> Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the United States
That’s probably a very stupid question, but is how this is a Chinese company when 60% are owned by American funds?
Presumably, the relevant factor here is not ownership on paper, but who has real control via being able to tell Bytedance employees (including the executives) what to do. Which, in this case, is assumed to be China’s government leaders.
Control can be separated from who is owed what share of economic profits. For example, some Alphabet and Meta shares having more voting power than others.
On a more pragmatic level, even in the US "own" means what society will defend for you. However, the US (and other western countries) are presumed to have courts that have a higher probability of defending claims of ownership assuming you have the right paperwork. Whereas in places like China, it is presumed that your paperwork is less likely to entitle you to a defense.
In the US government's view, as expressed in its brief in the Supreme Court:
"Because of the authoritarian structures and laws of the PRC regime, Chinese companies lack meaningful independence from the PRC’s agenda and objectives. As a result, even putatively ‘private’ companies based in China do not operate with independence from the government. Indeed, “the PRC maintains a powerful Chinese Communist Party committee ‘embedded in ByteDance’ through which it can ‘exert its will on the company.’ ... the committee includes “at least 138 employees,” including ByteDance’s “chief editor”
...
"Even assuming that the law would recognize Zhang as a bona fide domiciliary of Singapore and not the PRC, ByteDance would nevertheless qualify as being “controlled by a foreign adversary” under one or more of the other statutory criteria. For instance, ByteDance is “headquartered in” China, which is sufficient on its own.... ByteDance also is “subject to the direction or control of ” Chinese persons domiciled in China (in particular, Chinese Communist Party officials), which likewise is sufficient on its own."
http://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24-656/336144/20241...
The saddest part of this to me was watching congressional representatives try to wrestle with the Singapore thing and fail in hearings. It really made me feel like they thought they had some kind of gotcha when in reality all they did was publicly demonstrate how little they actually grasp the real national security threat at play.
Same way the Singaporean CEO is part of the CCP: He's not, it's not, but there are a lot of vested interests like Facebook lobbying to treat them as the boogeyman.