BY Nicole Hao
August 7, 2020 Updated:
August 25, 2020
The extent of CCP membership among
ByteDance management further demonstrates the company’s ties to the Chinese
regime, fueling security concerns about TikTok.
By law, Chinese companies are required
to set up Communist Party units within
their offices to ensure that business policies and employees toe the Party
line. ByteDance, founded in March 2012, set up its Party committee in October
2014.
According to Party regulations,
companies’ committee members are appointed at political conferences. Members
serve five-year terms.
It’s unclear exactly how many Party
members or committee members are among ByteDance’s 60,000 employees across 230
global offices; the list obtained by The Epoch Times is only a partial listing
of committee members at its Beijing headquarters.
At the headquarters office, at least
138 employees—mostly in management positions or technical roles—are in the
company’s influential Beijing Party committee, according to the internal
list. Sixty on the list are classified as having a managerial role.
The document details each committee
member’s full name, gender, birthday, date they joined the CCP, ID numbers, and
type of position in the company, such as managerial or technical.
The revelations come as the U.S.
government intensifies scrutiny of TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps on
national security grounds. U.S. officials have repeatedly sounded the alarm
that American personal data collected by TikTok could be accessed by Beijing,
as Chinese companies are beholden to the CCP.
ByteDance didn’t respond to a request
for comment.
President Donald Trump on Aug. 6
issued executive orders to ban U.S. transactions with ByteDance, and Chinese
internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. The ban will take effect in 45 days. Trump
has also given ByteDance until Sept. 15 to sell TikTok to Microsoft or another
American firm. Microsoft confirmed that it’s in talks to buy the app.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
previously said the U.S. administration’s actions targeting Chinese apps seek
to address a “broad array of national security risks that are presented by
software connected to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The CCP members list reveals the
extent of the Party’s relationship with ByteDance, and dovetails with the tech
giant’s long-documented history of cooperating with authorities on censorship.
Founder and CEO Zhang Yiming and other
senior executives have openly expressed their desire to have the company
support Party goals in the past.
James Carafano, vice president of The
Heritage Foundation’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, said
this level of CCP membership is typical for Chinese companies.
“All instruments of power are tied
back to the Communist Party, and that includes economic instruments of power,”
Carafano told The Epoch Times.
He said that in China, there is no
transparency about links between private companies and the CCP, thus “these
companies literally can’t be treated and trusted the way you would interface
with other companies in global commerce.”
ByteDance’s presence in the United
States via TikTok raises concerns, Carafano said, given its access to vast
swathes of Americans’ personal data. TikTok’s assurances that it operates
independently to ByteDance are “irrelevant,” he added.
“It’s a Chinese-owned company,”
Carafano said. “You have no confidence in the software. You have no confidence
in their handling of data. And you have no confidence that they’re independent
of Chinese direction.”
CCP Members List
Zhang Fuping, the company’s “chief
editor” and vice president, has previously been identified in Chinese media
reports as secretary of the firm’s Party committee. He also appears in the name
list The Epoch Times obtained.
Zhang is in charge of
censorship-related tasks for the company’s social media platforms.
In previous Chinese state-run media
reports, Zhang expressed his willingness to promote the Party’s censorship
policies.
In an April 2019 interview with Xinhua, Zhang explained
that network security to the company means “the public opinion can be led in
the right direction … full of positive energy, and promote the core values of
socialism.”
The internal name list that The Epoch Times
obtained reveals that many senior managers are also members of the Party
committee.
Committee member Zhang Nan (male) was
listed as an employee who directly reported to one of ByteDance’s top 14
executives, in an organization chart obtained by news site The Information in April 2019. Those 14
in turn report to the CEO, Zhang Yiming.
Zhang Nan was promoted in March to
business director of the Feishu app, according to a report by Chinese tech news
site Lei News. The tool combines different
collaboration apps into a single platform.
Meanwhile, Meng Haibo is director of
the public affairs department at ByteDance, according to a 2018
report by Youth Hangzhou, a state-run newspaper. He is in
charge of “affairs related to government cooperation” and heads big data
analysis projects, according to the report.
Dang Liya, a senior manager of
ByteDance’s language training apps, joined the Party in 2013.
Other staff on the list are
lower-level managers at the firm’s different properties, according to The Epoch
Times’ research.
For example, Xia Yong is the chief editor of Toutiao, a popular news
aggregator app owned by ByteDance, while Xia Manxue is a commercial product manager
there, according to her LinkedIn page.
The company’s hiring practices also
give Party members preference. For example, the company’s recent job recruitment
notice for “editors” in charge of monitoring
current-affairs-related content specified that “CCP members have hiring
priority.”
Police Cooperation
On April 25, 2019, ByteDance signed a
strategic cooperation agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security, which
is in charge of the country’s police.
Local police routinely arrest and detain those who post
information deemed sensitive by authorities.
At the signing ceremony, Zhan Jun,
Party boss of the propaganda department within the Ministry of Public Security,
said, “We should use new online media to voice out the good voices of Chinese
police, tell nice police stories, build a good image of our police, and foster
close relations between police and the people.”
State-run media China Police Net reported that ByteDance would help
set up and operate Toutiao and Douyin accounts for each police department
within all Chinese provincial governments—at the municipal and county levels—as
well as the national ministry. ByteDance will help to promote the posts
generated by the police accounts, the report added.
Chinese police own more than 50,000
social media accounts across different platforms and have more than 100 million
followers in total, according to the report.
Annie
Wu and Cathy He contributed to this report.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/edition/china-insider-33-2_3453103/3451561
No comments:
Post a Comment