The most fascinating entrepreneurial stories often go something like this: One person or one team seizes a seemingly crazy opportunity, perseveres, and achieves unimaginable success. TikTok is such a story. In 2017, Chinese internet giants' overseas expansion efforts were limited to focusing on payment and social networking, targeting Chinese tourists and overseas Chinese. At the time, TikTok was just getting started, and ByteDance, far from a giant, entered the US market, using TikTok to carve a rift in the home turf of Google and Meta. Even after three US presidents forced ByteDance to sell TikTok through executive orders and multiple rounds of congressional legislation starting in 2020, the team remained fully focused on what they do best—growth. Chips at the negotiating table don't count, but as long as they grow, they matter. Now, TikTok's five-year self-rescue in the US has come to an end. On the afternoon of September 25th (US time), Trump signed an executive order approving the new TikTok US transaction, stating that the plan complies with previous congressional legislation and will protect national security while keeping TikTok operating. The executive order states that the parties will establish a new joint venture in the United States to control the TikTok US app, including code operations and content review. ByteDance will hold no more than 20% of the joint venture. Local media, citing the White House, reported that Oracle and other companies will acquire a 45% stake, with existing ByteDance overseas shareholders holding the remaining shares. Related parties have also told us that TikTok's US operations will be split into two companies: A US company wholly owned by ByteDance will continue to be responsible for e-commerce, brand advertising, and connectivity with international operations. The new joint venture mentioned by the White House will involve external investors, with ByteDance holding a 19.9% stake. The joint venture will be responsible for TikTok's US data security, content assurance, software support, and related domestic operations. US Vice President J.D. Vance valued the company at $14 billion. ByteDance will retain ownership of TikTok's recommendation algorithm and license it to the joint venture. A week ago, the leaders of China and the United States held a phone call. A spokesperson for China's Ministry of Commerce subsequently stated that the company respects the wishes of Chinese companies and is pleased to see them conduct commercial negotiations based on market rules and reach solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and balance interests. The spokesperson also expressed hope that the US will provide an open, fair, and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies to invest in the US. ByteDance announced on September 20th that it would proceed with relevant work in accordance with Chinese law, ensuring that TikTok's US operations continue to serve American users. Trump's new executive order provides legal guarantees for the transaction to proceed. However, the details of the transaction framework, including algorithm licensing, have not yet been released and require final confirmation by all parties and approval from the Chinese government. If the transaction goes through, the power dynamics between the two companies will determine TikTok's long-term development. Currently, over 100 million Americans, including 60% of young people, use TikTok. Its users spend an average of 52 minutes per day, 1.5 times more than Instagram. Globally, TikTok is already a massive platform with 1.6 billion monthly active users. According to eMarketer, TikTok is expected to generate $14.3 billion in advertising revenue in the United States by 2025. The United States is the world's largest consumer and advertising market, with the value generated by digital ads viewed by one American equivalent to that of 32 Indians. This is why ByteDance initially began its internationalization efforts in the United States—only by conquering the American market could it secure ample advertising revenue and the ability to attract English-language creators to compete globally with Silicon Valley giants. TikTok epitomizes the end of the era of globalization, and its fate will inevitably shape the expectations and investments of many more companies regarding the global business environment. The first to be affected are its creators and the employees who have been striving for growth over the past few years. A Calm Morning For the past week, news about the details of the TikTok deal has been swirling, but nothing much has happened at the TikTok offices. After the executive order was signed, a Chinese TikTok employee in the US said no one in the office was discussing the matter, and everyone was working as usual. On Friday morning (September 19th), US time, following a phone call between the Chinese and US presidents, Trump posted that the TikTok deal had been approved. Li Ming (a pseudonym), a TikTok employee on a business trip in the US, saw the news on WeChat. Minutes later, ByteDance's official WeChat account released a brief announcement. ByteDance released an announcement in the early morning of September 20th. Li Ming, based in China and managing global business, had become somewhat numb to the news—over the past six months, Trump had issued five executive orders delaying the ban. That day, he visited TikTok's local office. It was lunchtime, and the cafeteria was deserted—many people were working from home on Friday. It was as if nothing had happened. The West Coast sun, as usual, streamed down onto the empty dining tables. On September 19th, six hundred kilometers away, the atmosphere at TikTok's San Jose offices was equally calm. Employees proceeded with their work as usual, conversing only briefly during lunch breaks. Some joked that buying Oracle stock at this point might yield a fortune—rumors circulated at the time that Oracle was involved in the acquisition. As usual, the company offered no explanation for the transaction. Ordinary employees, as usual, followed the developments online through online news. From the threat of a shutdown in 2020, to TikTok CEO Chow Sau-chiu facing intense questioning in Washington in 2023, to last year's US Congressional legislation mandating a "sale or ban" for TikTok, to the one-day suspension earlier this year and three extensions of the ban, to the finalization of the transaction, TikTok's crisis in the US has now stretched on for five years. Over the past five years, Google, Meta, and domestic e-commerce competitors have poached TikTok employees, leading to a wave of departures after finding better job opportunities. The repetition and delays have left those who remain, numb to their work, focused on performance and promotions, and adapting to repeated rounds of structural and business adjustments. More than a dozen countries have already followed the US's lead, banning TikTok from government devices in the name of national security. The TikTok deal has taken another step forward. (Scroll up and down to view) "We're so overwhelmed with work every day that we can't focus on things beyond our control," said a Chinese employee at TikTok's US office. Several TikTok employees told us that their workdays are close to or exceeding 12 hours, requiring them to attend meetings with partners across time zones and working until 1 or 2 a.m. Many employees and management at TikTok's US office are Chinese. They were more concerned about another piece of visa news: also on September 19th, Trump signed an executive order raising the H-1B visa application fee to $100,000. This policy quickly caused panic among TikTok employees in elevators and cafeterias. H-1B visas are applied for by employers, and the number of visas is limited each year, with applicants participating in a lottery. It's the most common stepping stone to applying for a green card based on employment-based immigration, and the relevant policy directly affects whether they can continue to stay in the United States. For these Chinese working in the US, the visa policy has a more immediate and pressing impact than the company's spinoffs and acquisitions. Although White House officials quickly clarified that the policy does not apply to H-1B visa holders and only new applicants are required to pay the fee, some Chinese returning home for family vacations or traveling abroad still booked flights on the spur of the moment and rushed back to the US before the policy took effect on Sunday (September 21st), causing backlogs at immigration. They jokingly called themselves "H-1B slaves." Growth, growth, the only thing we can do. Among the TikTok employees we spoke with, Zhang Yue (a pseudonym) was one of the few who expressed strong emotions about the January 19th shutdown. He first described himself as "shocked," then as "desolate." Zhang Yue remembers that at a TikTok all-hands meeting late last year, Zhou Shouzi opened the meeting by saying, "Users are with us. Facts are with us. Law is with us." Zhang Yue believed him. On January 19th of this year, TikTok's US service was shut down. Panicked local colleagues asked him what to do. Zhang Yue reassured them by reassuring them that executives had promised at the all-hands meeting that there would be no layoffs. Inwardly, he felt fortunate that he was responsible for global operations and would cover other markets besides the US. A few hours later, US service was restored, but the shutdown made Zhang Yue realize how naive he had been. He had assumed that, with no evidence proving TikTok posed a threat to US national security and over 100 million Americans using it, the app couldn't be shut down. After January 19th, he felt that the company's origins in China would be considered an original sin, and that hiring more local executives, creating more local jobs, and spending lavishly on lobbying to change the US government's mind would have little effect. Like many of his colleagues, he came to believe that only high-growth business could save TikTok. Driven by performance, promotion, and the survival of their own business, TikTok employees diligently maintained this super product. A few days before the shutdown, Zhang Yue saw a colleague still selling ad space for January 19th. He said, "Dude, you're awesome!" The colleague replied, "Every day counts." Growth is indeed TikTok's only chance of survival—binding more interests and gaining greater influence will secure greater leverage. Since 2023, TikTok has launched a series of social features within the app, including group chats, and launched TikTok Lite for users with lower-spec phones. This has attracted over 100 million US users and supported tens of billions of dollars in annual advertising revenue. 7,000 employees work in TikTok's US offices, and over 200,000 merchants and 100,000 creators sell products on TikTok. Since the end of 2022, TikTok's e-commerce business has launched, and a group of post-90s executives who have fought hard in key domestic business lines have transferred to TikTok, including Zhou Sheng, head of domestic commercial products, Kevin Chen, president of Toutiao, and Zhi Ying, vice president of Douyin. The heads of e-commerce and advertising in the US market, previously local professional managers, were both replaced this year. The head of operations for TikTok's US live streaming business is a Chinese American. His direct reports were previously mostly American, but over the past year or so, almost all of them have become Chinese speakers. These transfers also attracted a wave of subordinates eager to achieve results and advance more quickly, particularly Douyin e-commerce employees, to join TikTok. A source familiar with the situation stated that communication among Chinese employees was smooth and efficient, with a shared language: "This is how Douyin does it, so let's do it this way." The American employees in the office, who came from Twitch and YouTube, didn't understand TikTok and wanted to implement American-style operations, such as purchasing copyrights to concerts and music festivals and livestreaming them. However, the Chinese employees felt that this approach was too slow and superficial in cultivating user mindsets. The real problem lay in how the platform guided creators' growth and operations. TikTok, which could be shut down at any time, couldn't possibly have nurtured a vast ecosystem like YouTube over more than a decade. "We can't just take it slow," he said. ByteDance's lobbying of the US government has not ceased. This year's lobbying team consists of 41 members, who continue to lobby the White House and both the Senate and the House on the issue of content platform regulation. According to the US political donation database OpenSecrets, ByteDance and TikTok's lobbying expenses reached a record high of $2.83 million in the first half of this year; in the second quarter, expenses fell to $2.02 million, lower than the same period in the past three years. The continuous addition of Chinese employees has brought efficiency but also brought new problems. The most prominent point is that many people communicate in Chinese during business. In April of this year, Business Insider quoted a US employee on TikTok's engineering team as saying that over the past six months, Chinese managers had spoken directly with them for less than 30 minutes. Documents and group chats on the internal messaging platform Lark were initially written in Chinese, and meetings were also conducted in Chinese, making it difficult for local employees to understand. A US TikTok employee explained that management changes often lead to changes in the two lower levels of staff, with lower-level employees constantly adapting to the new boss's expectations, which creates an additional workload. She compared the atmosphere within the US team to that of a foreign company a few years ago. However, after more Chinese employees transferred to the team, the team became increasingly competitive. Starting this year, TikTok has implemented internal English proficiency assessments, with content closely related to real-world work, such as discussing a specific topic in a meeting or answering questions from partners. Employees can take practice tests on the system, which are administered quarterly. The passing score is roughly equivalent to an IELTS score of 6.5. Employees who fail to meet the requirements will be restricted from promotions, business travel, and local business opportunities. Unfortunately, the efforts haven't paid off. With the US business deal finalized, Chinese employees remaining at the new TikTok US company will have to adapt to the different operational strategies of its American shareholders. Most US internet companies prefer to let their products grow organically and avoid building large operations teams. Instagram, with just a dozen people, built a content community with tens of millions of users. In its early years of internationalization, Facebook had a policy against hiring Ivy League graduates. In its view, the core of localization is resolving language translation issues faced by users in different countries and regions. This may lead to adjustments to the company's business and personnel. TikTok employees should also consider finding new opportunities. Looking for other opportunities, but there's no guarantee of success. After the "sell or ban" bill passed, a former TikTok mid-level manager observed that his Chinese students, who used to communicate in Chinese at work, began actively conducting meetings in English. They hoped to improve their English to find new jobs in the United States. Guo Xin (a pseudonym) is one of them. She graduated from an American university after the pandemic, just as numerous North American tech companies were laying off employees. She submitted hundreds of resumes but ultimately received only one offer from TikTok. She considered herself lucky; some classmates received offers from Disney, Amazon, and Google, only to have their contracts canceled at the last minute, leaving them looking for new opportunities. For the past few years, TikTok has been the only option for many Chinese students to stay in the United States. A person working at a US tech company explained that the North American job market has deteriorated over the past two years. Tech companies have either laid off employees—Meta and Alphabet (Google's parent company) both laid off over 10,000 employees in late 2022 and early 2023, with further layoffs since then—or suspended or reduced PERM (labor certification) processing for foreign workers. Only TikTok is still hiring on a large scale and helping its employees obtain green cards. Another former employee also noted that, aside from TikTok, no other company in the US can issue visas to so many Chinese nationals in non-technical positions. US internet giants dominate the largest consumer market and have a global reach beyond China. They enjoy easy money and rarely focus on heavy operations. The few companies that prioritize operations prefer to hire locals. A few months ago, Guo Xin also began looking for a job, but it wasn't going well, as there weren't many vacancies on the market. She remained calm over the phone, saying that instead of complaining, it's better to think of solutions, saying, "There's always a way out." At the end of the call, she sighed, "A grain of sand in the era can become a mountain on a person's head." Guo Xin wanted to change jobs because she was exhausted. Her colleagues were scattered across offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Jose, and New York, with a significant number also in China. She started work at noon and sometimes was still in meetings with the China team until one or two in the morning. A former TikTok employee, having just transferred from China to San Jose, was excited about being exposed to cutting-edge information in Silicon Valley. However, he often met with the China team in the evening and didn't wake up until noon the next day, a schedule that completely missed out on socializing. Some employees even gave their dogs away because they simply didn't have time to walk them. As a result, on the American workplace ratings website Glassdoor, employees gave TikTok a low score of 3.2, leaving anonymous comments like "Byebye personal life" (Joining the company means saying goodbye to your personal life). Amazon, known for its excessive overtime and strict management, has a rating of 3.6. But TikTok "pays really well." According to Glassdoor, in Los Angeles, TikTok offers software engineers an annual salary of $200,000 to $310,000, 1.5 times the local average. The crisis has dragged on for five years, and those with better options have already left. Some of those remaining in TikTok's US operations are Chinese employees who arrived on L or H visas. They typically oversee global operations and, after the US divestiture, will be able to continue their previous roles elsewhere. Others are local employees with legal status, who are mostly solely responsible for US operations. Those without US citizenship who wish to stay face the greatest pressure. To mitigate the risks of layoffs, some are choosing to temporarily leave their families behind and work alone in the US, while waiting for new opportunities in China. Before joining TikTok, Cheng Bo (a pseudonym) worked for a Chinese mobile phone manufacturer, specializing in overseas business. She witnessed Xiaomi's 4.8 billion yuan freeze by the Indian government in 2022. At the time, she didn't understand the profound impact of such events. Later, when she joined TikTok and encountered the Indonesian government's ban on TikTok's e-commerce business, panicked merchants approached her asking what to do about their business. Only then did she realize the profound impact geopolitics can have. With these experiences, she no longer feels nervous when discussing the "sell or ban" scenario. After TikTok's US service was suspended on January 19th, she and her colleagues made a bet on whether it would be permanently shut down or reopen within 30 days. She won a meal. She's gradually come to accept that uncertainty is the fate of this industry and believes that the expansion of Chinese companies overseas is unstoppable. But she also asked me, after leaving a platform company, where can she find a job? The power of geopolitics was foreshadowed more than a decade ago. At the end of 2012, the US Congress held a hearing to examine whether Huawei's US telecommunications equipment business posed a threat to national security. Huawei responded proactively. Ren Zhengfei personally led senior executives in hosting former US President Jimmy Carter and a group of US congressmen in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, respectively. Huawei's US operations spent millions of dollars on legal lobbying, and a senior vice president testified before Congress. Despite the lack of definitive evidence, the House Intelligence Committee still ruled that Huawei posed a security threat to US network infrastructure. At that hearing, a member of Congress articulated the fundamental conflict: Congress must respond whenever there's a potential threat. "We can't wait for the threat to materialize, as we did after 9/11." The experiences of both Huawei and TikTok are based on this assumption. In 2020, we concluded our article on TikTok's US lobbying efforts by writing that TikTok was a test case—what level of commercial cooperation could two societies with significant differences maintain? Now the results are in. A few months ago, Zhang Yue left TikTok. TikTok was requiring employees to travel more frequently to the US, and his child had just been born. He recalled studying in the US nine years ago. Back then, some Americans, upon learning he was from China, would give him a thumbs-up and declare, "China is powerful." That year, during his first presidential campaign, Trump gave a speech at Zhang Yue's school. Standing in front of a row of American flags, he shouted, "We want to build a wall, but who's going to pay for it?" Onlookers, Zhang Yue joined the crowd holding "Make America Great Again" signs, pumping their fists and shouting, "Mexican! Mexican!" Nine years later, Trump was inaugurated for a second time. This time, he aimed not only to build a wall but also to completely shake up the international system that had been largely shaped by the US over the past decades. The global trade war and the TikTok deal were just the beginning.
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