The chair of TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has stepped down, as the Chinese government tightens its control of China’s tech sector and maintains pressure on the industry’s domestic entrepreneurs. Zhang Yiming announced in May he would step down as chief executive of the tech company he co-founded and on Wednesday he relinquished his chair title, with ByteDance’s English-language website no longer featuring a page that mentioned his formal board role. Instead, there was a photo of Zhang under the heading of “leadership” with no title underneath. ByteDance declined to comment. Reuters reported that ByteDance’s new chief executive, co-founder Liang Rubo, has taken over as chair of the company’s five-person board. It was also unclear whether there had been any changes to Zhang’s control of ByteDance, where he owns 50% of the voting rights. In May, the company had said he would move to a “key strategy” position at the end of the year. At the time, Zhang said he was leaving the role because he lacked managerial skills and preferred “reading and daydreaming” to running the tech group. ByteDance is one of Chinese tech’s biggest global success stories thanks to TikTok, the short-video platform that has amassed more than 1 billion users worldwide and has become a competitive threat to rival US tech firms such as Facebook, Snapchat and Google-owned YouTube. ByteDance was valued at $140bn (£102bn) in a fundraising round last year. It also owns Douyin, a video platform for its domestic market, and other interests that span education, gaming and business software. A number of founders at some of China’s most well-known tech companies have in recent months given up overseeing daily operations amid a government clampdown on the tech sector. Last week, the short-video apps owner Kuaishou said its co-founder, Su Hua, had stepped down as chief executive. The founder of the e-commerce company Pinduoduo, Huang Zheng, stepped down as chair this year, having earlier relinquished his chief executive title. According to analysts, the Chinese government has become increasingly concerned about the power and influence that has been amassed by wealthy tech entrepreneurs, with many of them multibillionaires. Tencent, a social media, gaming and finance group, and Alibaba, an online shopping giant, have both pledged multibillion pound sums to help achieve the “common prosperity” of the nation. Jack Ma, Alibaba’s co-founder, has been a high-profile victim of the crackdown, only recently venturing outside China to go on holiday in Spain. Ma has limited his public appearances since the planned float of his online finance platform, Ant Group, was blocked by President Xi Jinping last year. The move came shortly after Ma delivered a speech criticising Chinese financial regulators. Foreign tech firms are also retreating from China, with Yahoo announcing this week that it was was quitting the country because of the “increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China”. The timing of the withdrawal coincided with China’s new data protection law coming into effect on Monday. The law limits the conditions under which companies can gather personal information and sets rules for how it is used. The ByteDance board move comes after the company on Tuesday announced a major organisational reshuffle to create six business units. It also said TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, would step down as chief financial officer at ByteDance in order to focus on running the video platform full-time. ByteDance has been approached for comment.