A former top executive at TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has claimed in court documents that the Chinese Community Party had access to TikTok data, despite it being stored in the US.

These explosive claims was made by Yintao Yu, who worked as head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S. operations between 2017 and 2018, during a wrongful dismissal lawsuit filed in the San Francisco Superior Court.

He says the Chinese Community Party (CCP) “maintained supreme access” to TikTok data stored in the U.S. and tat he believed ByteDance “has served as a useful propaganda tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Yu claimed in the suit that the CCP had their own “special office or unit” inside ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters and it “played a significant role in how the company advanced core Communist values”.

The lawsuit claims ByteDance is aware that if the Chinese government’s backdoor was removed from the international/U.S. version of the app, the Chinese government would, it feared, ban the company’s valuable Chinese-version apps.”

It also accuses ByteDance of pushing “nationalistic content [that] served to both increase engagement on ByteDance’s websites and to promote support of the CCP,” and that the Communist Party could access American user data through what he dubs a “backdoor channel in the code.”

Yu’s suit alleges that ByteDance was “aware that if the Chinese government’s backdoor was removed from the international/U.S. version of the app, the Chinese government would, it feared, ban the company’s valuable Chinese-version apps.”

TikTok has recently denied that the CCP has access to US user data, stored in America and Singapore.

ByteDance said it will “vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint.”