When Chinese software engineer Ben joined TikTok’s San Jose office in 2023, he felt as if he had entered a workplace back in his home country. All but a handful in his 100-strong team were Chinese nationals. Employees spoke in Mandarin and addressed each other as tong xue — an endearing term widely used in Chinese tech companies meaning “classmate.” 

On his first day, Ben’s manager walked him through Lark, the proprietary work communication app of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok. He was surprised to find that the onboarding file and work messages on Lark were mostly in Chinese. “It was a reverse culture shock,” said Ben, who had previously worked at an American company and spoke to Rest of World under a pseudonym. “[TikTok] is more Chinese than what I’m used to.”

The 658,000-square-foot San Jose campus Ben works from is currently TikTok’s largest office in the U.S., with over 4,000 employees. The massive team was built in a mere two years. TikTok surged in popularity among American teenagers during the pandemic and now has 170 million U.S. users. Last year, ByteDance’s reported revenue nearly matched that of Meta, which would make it one of the world’s most lucrative internet technology companies. But in the U.S., TikTok has also been beset by allegations of potential censorship and data security breaches. Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that would push ByteDance to sell the app within 270 days, or leave the country. TikTok has pledged to challenge the law. 

U.S. politicians had been floating a TikTok divestiture or ban for years, citing national security concerns. To fend off political pressure, the company has downplayed its China connections. TikTok appointed non-Chinese executives, and its current chief executive Shou Zi Chew, is based in Singapore. The company set up headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles, and moved U.S. user data to Oracle servers. 

But more than a dozen current and former U.S.-based TikTok employees who spoke to Rest of World, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the company, say that TikTok’s ties to ByteDance go further than what the company presents. They say ByteDance executives, and not Chew, manage key departments made up of thousands of U.S.-based TikTok employees. In recent years, managers from Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese sister app, have been transferred to the U.S. to help replicate that app’s commercial success. Rest of World’s sources also provided additional details corroborating reporting in outlets like Forbes and The Wall Street Journal about ByteDance executives’ involvement in TikTok. 

4000 The number of employees at TikTok’s San Jose office.

The deep ties between ByteDance and TikTok underscore the difficulty of separating the two entities. It also means a potential divestiture could deprive TikTok of key Chinese management personnel and technologies. 

Ben’s team, for example, works on a core element of TikTok’s business: monetization. The team, which has 3,000 members, optimizes the flow of advertisements shown to the audience to maximize click-through rate conversion, thereby driving revenue growth. Industry observers consider monetization, as well as TikTok’s powerful search function and its For You recommendation algorithm, as one of the app’s three “secret sauces.” 

However, Ben said that according to the official reporting line charts on Lark, his department reports to ByteDance veteran Zhang Lidong, the company’s head of commercialization, and not Chew. Ben said that decisions on his team are often made only after consulting with a senior manager based in China.

A TikTok spokesperson told Rest of World that they have “always been clear” about the relationship between TikTok and ByteDance and that many of the statements from Rest of World’s sources were false.

“Our CEO, Shou Chew, has authority over TikTok budgets and strategy. Significant projects and capital expenditures are coordinated with the parent company, following appropriate fiduciary obligations. Those obligations include responsibility to our Board of Directors and investors, roughly 60% of which are international investors, 20% are the company’s founders, and 20% are our employees — including thousands of Americans,” said the spokesperson. 

TikTok did not respond to Rest of World’s request for clarity on what information from sources was false or what “significant projects” at TikTok involve coordination with ByteDance.   

According to a 2023 statement TikTok posted on its Australian site, the company claims that Chew oversees “all key day-to-day and strategic decision making.” In a 2022 letter to U.S. legislators, TikTok said ByteDance did play a role in hiring key personnel at TikTok, but the company was led by Chew. In reality, employees say, many key strategic and personnel decisions at TikTok come from ByteDance executives. 

Internally, employees and managers call the company “ByteDance” and “TikTok” interchangeably, as most tech teams work closely with China-based Douyin staffers. A senior TikTok engineer told Rest of World he estimates that the tech teams, which include software engineers, product managers, and user experience designers, have 40% to 60% of their members based in China.

“Because Douyin is so crazily successful, there’s a knee-jerk reaction to say, hey, we need to replicate that overseas,” Chris Pereira, founder of consultancy iMpact, which advises Chinese firms on global expansion, told Rest of World.

“Management talks about TikTok as if it is the underachieving sibling. It is clear that Douyin is the parents’ favorite.”

However, TikTok teams that interact with American clients, users, and regulatory bodies, according to three current and former employees, have fewer Chinese employees. The U.S. Data Security team, set up to protect American user data and address American national security concerns, exclusively hires U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Some new teams at TikTok launched after 2022 are completely U.S.-based, three sources told Rest of World.  

Senior employees say that the reliance on ByteDance executives at TikTok is tied to the company’s desire to replicate Douyin’s staggering profitability within China. Although TikTok has achieved global commercial success, Douyin dwarfs TikTok in revenue and remains the company’s biggest moneymaker. The app, which is available only in China, now offers everything from shopping to food delivery and mobile games. Executives within ByteDance often cite Douyin when setting goals and strategies for TikTok. “Management talks about TikTok as if it is the underachieving sibling. It is clear that Douyin is the parents’ favorite,” a senior software engineer said.

Previous reporting has outlined the interconnectedness between Douyin and TikTok. According to Rui Ma, a China tech analyst who co-wrote a Harvard Business Review report on ByteDance’s organizational strategy, the company pools together key personnel from different departments, such as software engineers, designers, and data scientists, to form shared-service platforms (SSP). 

“It was a common practice among Chinese internet companies, but no one got it to work like ByteDance,” Ma told Rest of World. “This allows ByteDance to keep its core assets, like algorithms, close and rely on its bigger source of Chinese talent, instead of trying to build [staffing] from scratch in the U.S.” But that also means it would be challenging for TikTok to operate independently without the support of its China-based ByteDance staff, Ma said.

TikTok’s close relationship to ByteDance has significant benefits for its operations. ByteDance executives, for example, can seamlessly transfer lessons over from Douyin. But the involvement of China-based managers in TikTok’s U.S. operations also exposes TikTok to political vulnerabilities. “Being a Chinese company is TikTok’s biggest asset but also its biggest risk,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. 

“Being a Chinese company is TikTok’s biggest asset but also its biggest risk.”

While U.S. tech companies often operate using the same tactics as ByteDance — deploying American executives to manage international teams, for instance — with heightened U.S.-China tensions, any traces of personnel and data transfers between the two entities can draw the attention of American legislators. It also raises the question of whether TikTok could be considered a separate entity, making a potential sale difficult.

ByteDance’s failure in giving American local employees more say in running TikTok has made the app vulnerable to criticism, but a potential sale could help address those issues, said Pereira. He thinks TikTok might be able to more successfully localize if it gets acquired by an American company. “[In the] long term, the more local, the better,” he said.

Current employees know that TikTok’s promised legal fight against the new bill is likely to last years. Some say they are keeping an eye out for new jobs, given TikTok’s ongoing existential crisis. That hasn’t dampened the sense of camaraderie between Chinese-speaking colleagues on Ben’s team. 

“It feels like a college campus,” said Ben, who often goes to the cafeteria for lunch and sits with a group of his project teammates, who are mostly male Chinese nationals in their twenties. Common conversation topics include visa status, compensation packages at different tech companies, video games, and dating struggles in the Bay Area.

“Sometimes I feel bad for the only white guy on the team, because he cannot be part of this,” said Ben. “I try to eat with him once in a while.”