TikTok staffers say Chinese leadership has been tightening its grip over US operations

• A string of US executives have left TikTok in the past year.
• The departures are creating a management vacuum that Chinese leaders are filling, insiders told BI.
• TikTok is under political pressure to separate its US business from its China-based owner ByteDance.

The Trump administration is racing to curb TikTok's ties to China. But inside the company, a string of recent US executive departures and team restructurings have given Chinese leaders a greater grip on its American business, company insiders told Business Insider.

This month, US-based sales and marketing exec Blake Chandlee, who served as the face of TikTok at key industry events like Cannes and Advertising Week, stepped down. Will Liu, known as Liu Xiaobing in China, is taking over management of his global business solutions team. Liu, a Singapore-based staffer who reports to ByteDance China chairman Zhang Lidong, works on monetization products for the company's Chinese apps and TikTok.

The sales team shakeup is one example of a broader shift in power across several company departments.

TikTok made a big push to hire top talent in the US as it looked to launch new businesses like e-commerce in the country. But over the past year, at least seven key US-based executives, including Chandlee, have left their roles across various business lines. Some have been replaced by Chinese leaders. There's a sense among some of TikTok's roughly 7,000 US staffers that ByteDance executives who are either based in China or have come to the US from China are tightening control. Business Insider spoke to nine current and seven former staffers who have worked at the company in the past year.

"They have been consolidating under Chinese leadership," a TikTok employee who works on its e-commerce business told BI. "Before we had a senior manager in the US, and now the person is outside the US."

TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

The leadership balance may change again if TikTok finds a new owner outside ByteDance, as required by a divestment law. The Trump administration is working on a potential deal, and the president wrote on Friday that he was giving the company another 75 days to find a solution. Some employees are eager for a switch that would put new US executives in charge.

"I really hope this happens," a staffer who works in operations said of a prospective sale. "I hope it can be new leadership if they can really get bought by Oracle or someone else."

While staff at TikTok's parent company ByteDance have had the final say over its product for years, and US leaders like North America global business solutions head Khartoon Weiss remain, the 16 insiders felt that the recent departures of other top US managers expanded control of Chinese leaders.

TikTok's e-commerce team, which runs its Shop product under the leadership of China-based ByteDance executive Bob Kang, has lost several US leaders over the last year and a half, according to nine of the insiders.

Since late 2023, US executives that have exited include Sandie Hawkins, TikTok's former GM of US e-commerce; Marni Levine, one of Hawkins' two replacements, who oversaw TikTok Shop's US operations; and Mary Hubbard, the company's former head of governance and experience in the Americas for Shop.

Executives with experience working on TikTok's Chinese sister app are filling the void, including Mu Qing, a former Douyin e-commerce VP; Sheng Zhou, the company's SVP of global e-commerce; and product VP Xu Luran.

TikTok recruited heavily from Amazon and other big e-commerce players when it began testing Shop in the US a couple of years ago, bringing local knowledge into the business, insiders said. But in the past year, as US executives have left, leadership has shifted from building a localized shopping product to instead trying to imitate Douyin, a staffer who works on TikTok Shop told BI.

Chinese leadership is also cracking down on its US team this year after they felt the country underperformed in 2024, as BI previously reported.

Other US teams within TikTok have similarly seen American leaders swapped out for ByteDance staffers from China.

There have been examples of these power shifts as early as 2022. Vanessa Campos, a former TikTok recruiter focused on early career hires who left the company this year, wrote in an April blog post that her US manager was replaced by a global leader from China in late 2022 who began "tightening their grip on hiring priorities." Chinese leadership led the early careers team from that point forward, Campos told BI.

Rebecca Sawyer, TikTok's US advertising lead for small and midsize businesses, was replaced by ByteDance executive Qing Lan in late 2023. Qing previously worked on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin.

The e-commerce staffer said Chinese leadership's control of the business "hyper-accelerated" in the second half of 2024.

Globally, at least eight executives have left TikTok in 2025, The Information earlier reported, citing departures like the music exec Ole Obermann and North America ads leader Sameer Singh.

As more Chinese managers take charge, US staffers feel left out of the loop

ByteDance is still very much a Chinese tech company at its core. Decisions about its global products are often made in China, where it has offices in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou. US TikTok employees previously told BI that they refer to its Beijing office as "HQ."

As it's expanded into other parts of the world, ByteDance has brought hundreds of employees over from China into its new offices via H-1B or L-1 visas, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services records and another company employee with knowledge of its visa strategy.

About 670 of the roughly 1,100 approved US H-1B visa hires for TikTok and ByteDance workers were from China during fiscal year 2023, the most recent period BI was able to obtain data via a Freedom of Information Act request. In fiscal year 2022, the company received 445 H-1B approvals for Chinese nationals, per USCIS data shared with US Sen. Tom Cotton.

"A lot of leaders are Chinese nationals from mainland China," the employee with knowledge of its visa strategy said.

But the company also grew TikTok globally by leaning into the expertise of local hires. Business lines like recruiting, the creator outreach team, and its sales staff that interface with US marketers have generally operated with less oversight from China, four of the current and former staffers said. Staff members in some of those divisions have not had to take late calls with Chinese colleagues to accommodate time zone differences, for example. That independence from China has drifted away in the past year, the insiders told BI.

In 2024, TikTok's US creator team was asked to align its goals with a product team mostly based in China, a former staffer who worked on the creator team told BI.

"While we weren't actually reporting into them, it was almost like a dotted line," the ex-employee said. "If they said jump, the creator team had to jump."

US employees reporting to managers based in China told BI they sometimes feel excluded from the team, either because they don't speak or read Mandarin Chinese or because they work in a different time zone and are unable to join certain calls.

A trust and safety team member who does not speak Mandarin said it was challenging to try to work with Chinese colleagues who, they felt, often made little effort to accommodate their US teammates.

The staffer said they'd been provided with some internal documents translated from Mandarin that have been hard to follow.

"I'm always two days behind," they said.

Another staffer on the engineering team estimated their China-based manager had directly spoken to them for less than 30 minutes over the last six months.

The employee said it was challenging to work with translated documents and group chats in the company's internal messaging platform Lark that were originally written in Mandarin.

"The meetings conducted are in Chinese as well, so a lot of my American colleagues can't understand the context," this person said.

A former product staffer said they felt like it was harder to get their ideas heard after switching from a US-based manager to one based in China.

"I felt like they didn't really listen to the US opinion," the former employee said of their new manager. "They would say things like 'Just follow what the Chinese product manager said.'"

A TikTok sale in the US could shake up the company — if it actually shifts who is in charge

The power structure for TikTok's US business may shift in the coming weeks if new owners take over operations.

The company could reach a deal to sell TikTok's US assets in order to comply with the law requiring ByteDance to divest from its US app.

ByteDance said it's talking to the US government about a potential solution, but key matters need to be resolved, and an agreement would be subject to approval under Chinese law.

As staffers await a political resolution, morale at the company is low among some who are experiencing burnout and dealing with the aftermath of a recent review cycle that led to performance-improvement plans and staff exits, company insiders previously told BI.

"We essentially haven't had a voice for a very long time," the second e-commerce worker said. "They say they want you to be candid and clear, but really they want you to fall in line and follow the Chinese and rebuild Douyin."

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Ashley Rodriguez and Shubhangi Goel contributed reporting.