Technology History | One Raffles Quay — The Chief Executive Who Kept Having to Say Where He Was From

TikTok announced its new chief executive on 30 April 2021, and the announcement had to explain where he would sit.

Shou Zi Chew (周受資) would run the company from Singapore while remaining chief financial officer of ByteDance, a job he had taken up only that March after five years at Xiaomi.

The post had been empty for eight months.

Kevin Mayer, recruited from Disney, resigned in August 2020 after roughly three months, citing a political environment that had changed sharply around him; Vanessa Pappas held the role on an interim basis from Los Angeles and became chief operating officer.

ByteDance had already leased three floors here, more than 60,000 square feet, moving out of shared space in Asia Square Tower 1 a few streets away.

TikTok's own description of itself names Singapore and Los Angeles together as its head offices.

Set that against the rest of the corporate map and the reason the ownership question never resolved cleanly becomes visible: a parent incorporated in the Cayman Islands, engineering and origins in Beijing, head offices in Singapore and California, and a Singaporean running the whole thing.

Every part of that is true at once, which is what made it useless as an answer in Washington.

Chew was asked about it constantly.

Before the Senate Judiciary Committee on 31 January 2024, after a run of questions about his passports, his wife's nationality and his children's, he was asked whether he belonged to the Chinese Communist Party and replied, "Senator, I'm Singaporean. No."

He had done two years of national service, a fact he returned to more than once that day, and Singapore does not permit dual citizenship.

Chew stayed in the job through the divestiture and sits on the board of the American joint venture that took over the United States business in January 2026.

One Raffles Quay is two towers of faintly green glass at the edge of Marina Bay, completed in August 2006 to a Kohn Pedersen Fox design worked up with Architects 61: a 50-storey north tower and a 29-storey south tower.

The north tower is the interesting one structurally, because two Mass Rapid Transit tunnels run directly beneath it at shallow depth, and the engineers had to skew the building mass across them and carry the load on a transfer structure built into the central core.

The offices are private, the plaza is not, and David Gerstein's sculpture Momentum stands at its edge — a stack of painted steel figures, visible at the right-hand side of the photograph on this memory.

The complex has its own underground exit into Raffles Place MRT station, so you can reach the lobby without going outside at all.

Photo: Nicolas Lannuzel, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons