The dispute has drawn ire from state-run Chinese media outlets, whose editorials are often looked upon as a barometer of sentiment among senior officials.
The state-run newspaper China Daily, for example, dismissed a potential sale of the app as a “smash and grab” raid orchestrated by the US government.
“China does not actually ban American websites or software — it only requires them to ‘be Chinese’ as they operate in China,” wrote Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Global Times, in a post on the Chinese social media website Weibo. “TikTok fully complies with US laws … but the US government still wants to ban it.”
“The US approach is much more determined and tough compared to the Chinese approach,” he added. Former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee made similar arguments in a WeChat post about TikTok that was reported widely in Chinese media, saying that Chinese laws are clear about what foreign companies can do to operate in China. In TikTok’s case, though, the company was left no choice but to consider a forced sale.
And Liu Hong, deputy editor-in-chief for the Globe — a magazine run by state-owned Xinhua News Agency — recently called the TikTok saga “too nasty.”
In an internal memo sent to employees on Monday, ByteDance CEO and founder Zhang Yiming acknowledged that the “past few months have been a challenging time for us all.”
“We initiated preliminary discussions with a tech company to help clear the way for us to continue offering the TikTok app in the US,” Zhang wrote in the memo, which ByteDance provided to CNN Business.
“We do not yet know the exact details of what our end solution will be,” he added.
“Candidly, it is unlikely that the level of interest and speculation around TikTok will cease in the short term, and I recognize that this can be very distracting.”
Chinese media has lamented ByteDance’s struggles in the United States. The national newspaper Guangming Daily on Monday held up the debate over TikTok as emblematic of the kind of experience that might await other Chinese companies with plans to expand beyond mainland China.
“It’s an object of reference for any Chinese company that wants to go global,” the paper added.