Technology History | AVIC Plaza, Zhongguancun — The App Now Called TikTok Shipped Under Another Name

The gate sign at 中航廣場 says no entry without a staff card, and behind it stands the compound people mean when they say ByteDance's headquarters. Whether it is one is a fair question. ByteDance (字節跳動) was founded in March 2012 by Zhang Yiming (張一鳴) and Liang Rubo (梁汝波), university roommates from Nankai who had already built a property search engine together. Their bet was that a phone should decide what you read, instead of a person you had chosen to follow. The news app Toutiao (今日頭條) launched in August 2012 and proved the recommendation engine worked at scale. Four years later the same machinery was pointed at short video. The app shipped in September 2016 under the name A.me and was renamed Douyin (抖音) that December, though sources disagree on whether the release day was the 20th or the 26th, which is about as precise as the record allows. Douyin is not TikTok, and the distinction survives every attempt to collapse it. They are separate applications with separate user bases, separate content rules and separate data storage; TikTok has never operated inside China, and Douyin has never operated outside it. TikTok arrived internationally the following year, then absorbed the American audience of a Shanghai-founded rival, musical.ly, in a merger completed on 2 August 2018. Back to the headquarters question. Chinese-language directories place the head office at building 1, at building 4, and at A1, all inside this one walled compound off the North Third Ring Road — which suggests a company that spread into whatever it could lease rather than commissioning a tower. Chinese Wikipedia records that reading alongside a second one: that ByteDance has no headquarters at all, and organises its offices deliberately without a centre. The photographer who took the picture on this memory hedged the same way, captioning the tower only as the building said to be ByteDance's. That is an odd thing to be uncertain about, for a company whose ownership two governments spent years arguing over. What a visitor finds here is a barrier gate, a guard booth, parked delivery bikes and the AVIC logo on a concrete arch — an office park in Haidian, not a monument. Photo: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons