The United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Thursday that China had authorized the transfer agreement for the TikTok app, which allows users to record short videos. He said he expected the deal to proceed in the upcoming weeks and months, but he did not provide any other information.
“In Kuala Lumpur, we finalized the TikTok agreement in terms of getting Chinese approval, and I would expect that would go forward in the coming weeks and months, and we’ll finally see a resolution to that,” he said on “Mornings with Maria” on Fox Business Network after President Donald Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping was praised as “amazing” and “12” on a 10-point scale. However, the deal that the two leaders achieved seems to be little more than a tenuous truce in a trade war that has yet to tackle its underlying reasons.
The agreement unveiled Thursday, which calls for China to resume buying soybeans, halt its export restrictions on rare earths for a year, and reduce U.S. tariffs on China by 10%, essentially restores relations to the pre-tit-for-tat escalation period that preceded Trump’s “Liberation Day” offensive.
So, China will appropriately resolve TikTok-related concerns with the United States, the Commerce Ministry of China stated in a statement earlier Thursday. According to a Chinese official, “the Chinese side will work with U.S. side to properly address issues related to TikTok.” ByteDance, a Chinese company that owns TikTok, did not immediately respond.
Bytedance Ownership Breakdown
After the U.S. Congress approved a bill in 2024 requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the service’s U.S. assets by January 2025, the status of the 170 million-user app has been unclear for more than 18 months. On September 25, Trump issued an executive order stating that the plan to sell TikTok’s U.S. business to a group of American and international investors satisfies the national security conditions outlined in the 2024 law. He also authorized the investors 120 days to finalize the deal.
Additionally, he postponed the law’s implementation until January 20, 2026. According to Trump’s order, the new joint venture will be in charge of the algorithm’s functioning and the U.S. company’s security partners will retrain and oversee it. As per the deal on TikTok’s U.S. operations, ByteDance has appointed one of the seven board members for the new company; the other six positions are occupied by Americans.
Furthermore, if ByteDance didn’t sell its U.S. assets, it would possess less than 20% of TikTok U.S. in order to meet the legal requirements that mandated the company shut down by January 2025.
As part of ByteDance’s plan to sell U.S. assets of the short video app, U.S. Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, stated this month that a license arrangement for the use of the TikTok algorithm would raise “serious concerns.”
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