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Comment by revnode | Hacker News Reader

> shutting down a company

It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government. That was the point being made. If it was an independent company, none of this would be happening.

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> It's not a company. It's a division of a foreign government.

Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell this is just not the case, and none of the people saying it are clarifying what they mean.

If you examine ByteDance's structure technically, you are correct that it does look like just a regular company. But just about everything runs differently in China. All major companies in China have CCP party members on their boards who not only influence corporate policy, but are actually _deferred to_ on anything remotely political.[2][3] At the end of the day the party has the final say in any matters that it cares about. There's actually a fundamental difference that many westerners don't understand about China, and it comes from an ignorance of the country's history in my opinion: there is no real rule of law, there is the current will of the party[1]. Obviously there's a ton of whataboutism that you can misdirect here about how the US or other western countries don't follow their constitutions or whatever, but it is fundamentally different, as the differences in the CCP run very deep down to the daily lives of basically every citizen ("show me a warrant" does NOT fly in China, ever).

TLDR; the CCP does whatever it wants whenever it wants, and is deeply ingrained in every major corporation at the highest levels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_People%27s...

[2] https://thediplomat.com/2019/12/politics-in-the-boardroom-th...

[3] https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3045053/c...

Source 3 is literally about state-owned companies, and would not apply at all...

https://www.bytedance.com/en/#corporate-structure

ByteDance Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok Ltd. (Cayman) -> TikTok LLC. (US)

Legally it is indeed a company and not controlled by the CCP, but exactly how much of its US operations are conducted and directed by non-US citizens on non-US soil is unknown.

This post is going to be similar to my other two comments in this thread.

First, it being incorporated in the Caymans is a technicality. ByteDance's headquarters are in Beijing[1] and they don't speak of a Cayman Islands office. In addition...

> As with many Chinese companies, the company has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee serving the party members among the employees, with vice president Zhang Fuping serving as its Party Committee Secretary. It also has a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Public Security for the ministry's public relations efforts, and joint ventures with a state-run publisher in Beijing and media firm in Shanghai. ... It has garnered public attention over allegations that it worked with the Chinese Communist Party to censor and surveil content pertaining to Xinjiang re-education camps and other topics the Party deemed controversial. [2]

[1] https://www.inputmag.com/culture/tiktok-weirdly-tries-to-sug...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

Why is this being downvoted?

Technically correct, but you're almost as guilty of being dishonest as the comment you're replying to saying it's "not a company".

A lot of companies are incorporated in the Cayman Islands, or in Ireland, or other tax havens, but we don't generally refer to them as Cayman companies or Irish companies.

Companies will regularly incorporate in low-tax jurisdictions, but that doesn't exactly make them headquartered in those areas, where they may actually do zero business. ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese multinational internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. [1]

TikTok's parent company ByteDance has sought permission from the Chinese government to export technology, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. ByteDance filed a request with the Beijing Municipal Commerce Bureau asking for approval to export its technology under restrictions recently implemented by the Chinese government, according to Bloomberg. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/bytedance-seeks-china-govern...

Google and Facebook etc also have lots of unAmerican citizens and operations on unAmerican soil.

Just because it is registered elsewhere doesn't mean it is not a Chinese company. Seriously, how can anyone think this is a valid argument? Do you think DouYin and TikTok originated from different companies?

Bytedance is not owned by the Chinese government. It's an independent company, as is TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ByteDance

Wikipedia is not a good source one way or the other.

You're not citing a better source either agreeing or opposing the argument made though.

Yes, for their TaoTiao subsidiary, not TikTok.

It says right there in your link that Bytedance is legally a Cayman's Islands company.

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