On Thursday, the head of TikTok will be heard in the US Congress, and the questions will mainly concern China and the network’s close ties with this country. Shou Chu was born in 1983, went through tough trials in the army, was also a banker, but also an important person in the smartphone industry. Chu is Singaporean and has been running TikTok for less than two years.

Shou Chu is 40 years old, he was born in Singapore and lives there. He graduated from University College London and received an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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He had and has connections with the Western business environment, but also with the Chinese one, which helped him a lot to meet and deal with people from different cultures.

And he needed a lot of experience, because TikTok is an unusual company, because it is the only social network with more than a billion users that was not created in America, but in China. This is where many of the issues that TikTok is trying to overcome stem from, as there are fears in the US that the Chinese government can spy on and manipulate the American public through the app.

The TikTok boss’s family is of Chinese origin, his father worked in construction, and his mother was an accountant. The family was not rich, but Chu scored very high in the national examination at the age of 12, which allowed him to enter an elite school.

He completed two and a half years of compulsory military service in Singapore and faced tough challenges such as five days in the jungles of Brunei as part of a survival course. Back then, he covered more than 80km on tough trails, but the challenge he faces now seems even tougher, because it’s not just up to him.

He worked in investment funds, but was also a banker at Goldman Sachs for two years.

He played an important role in the development of smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, where he served as CFO.

Since March 2021, he has been working at ByteDance, where he was the first financial director of the media group, which includes TikTok. Two months later, he was named CEO of TikTok, replacing Kevin Mayer, a former Disney senior executive. Mayer has only been in charge of TikTok for three months, at a time when Trump wanted to ban TikTok in the US:

Shou Chew rarely appears in public, while Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas is the person who appears most frequently and has been to the US Congress.

A profile published by the New York Times last September suggested that Zhu had little decision-making power and that Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance Group, was all-powerful.

Sources: BBC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times