Meeting the youthful Tik Tok president amid his tussle with the West

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TikTok CEO Xu Qiu has managed his business between the West and China during his rapid rise, and the cultural sphere has helped him land a top job at one of the world’s largest technology companies.

Shaw, 40, and a former Goldman Sachs banker is expected to appear before a House of Representatives committee on Thursday to discuss banning the app and reassure Americans that their data is safe.

He studied at Harvard

Born and raised in Singapore, he was educated in London and at Harvard Business School. He spent part of his early career doing venture capital deals in Asia, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

He then quickly moved up the C-suite as CFO of the Chinese smartphone giant at 32.

The young man manages TikTok from the company’s offices in Singapore but travels a lot, including in the United States, where he met his Taiwanese-American wife, who grew up at Harvard.

Qiu took over the top position on TikTok after Kevin Mayer, a senior figure at The Walt Disney Company, left his post after three months, as the Trump administration made previous efforts to force the sale of the app to US investors.

Furthermore, English is the young man’s first language, and he, like most Singaporeans, is of Chinese descent.

He did his military service

His father worked in construction, and his mother in accounting. He said he went from a humble upbringing at age 12, when he scored high marks on a national exam, to an elite high school.

In parallel, he has performed his compulsory military service for two and a half years while in the reserve service ranks, which ends when he reaches 50 years of age.

After completing his military service, he entered the University of London and remained in the British capital to work as a banker for Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

After an internship at meta business school and Facebook, he worked at the venture capital firm DST Global. His Mandarin in high school qualified him to be her China-focused partner.

Join “ByteDance”

In 2012, he and others in a modest apartment began developing an app that suggested news articles to people based on factors like how much time they’d spent on previous stories.

That company was ByteDance, which would later create TikTok. Its founder, the young Zhang Yiming, in which Zhou and his partners invested.

The other investment he led was in Xiaomi Corp., the Chinese smartphone giant with global ambitions.

The company hired him as a chief financial officer, then had him run its business outside China. He is the only one who stands out among his colleagues for understanding Chinese and Western corporate culture.

In 2021, Zhang, who has been in contact with Qiu, applied to become CFO of Dancebyte, which, in addition to TikTok, runs other popular Chinese apps.

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