Months after Twitter laid off 9 per cent of its staff and amidst an exodus of senior executives, the company’s China chief, Kathy Chen, today announced her resignation.
She revealed the move in a twelve-part tweetstorm hours before the start of the new year.
While Twitter has been blocked in mainland China since 2009, the troubled social network is still active in the country in pursuit of Chinese companies who want to advertise globally on Twitter. Major clients include Huawei and state news agency Xinhua.
Twitter’s controversial China chief is all on her own
Bad year for Twitter
The Hong Kong office, opened early last year, covers mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Kathy was the first Twitter chief for the China area.
“We are not shutting down our HK office,” a spokesperson said in October. But now it’s shut.
Kathy in her resignation tweets hailed the 400 per cent growth in advertisers in greater China over the past two years. The area “is one of our fastest growing revenue markets in Asia-Pacific for Twitter today and we remain committed to this market.”
Twitter chief technology officer leaving
A former exec at Cisco and Microsoft, Kathy’s Twitter appointment in April was controversialdue to her involvement with a firm from 1999 to 2005 with apparent links to China’s ministry of public security. According to her own description in a 2004 interview, that company made software used to filter “information of political sensitivity and harmful information.”
She ended her resignation missives with the “LoveTwitter” hashtag.
This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.
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