China criticized the US’s campaign to obstruct TikTok’s sale for years, once accusing Washington of acting in “robbers’ logic” in response to the platform’s success.
Beijing is currently promoting discussions about how ByteDance, the Chinese owner of the video-sharing platform, might cede control of its US operations.
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Analysts believe Beijing has come to view TikTok as a useful bargaining tool to win concessions on more pressing issues, which raises questions about what China might anticipate in return.
There are numerous unanswered questions about what a sale would entail, and China has yet to confirm a deal on TikTok, which Washington has portrayed as a threat to privacy and as a propaganda tool for Beijing.
The question of who would own and control TikTok’s recommendations algorithm, which is credited with boosting the platform’s explosive popularity in the US, where it claims more than 170 million users, is most important.
Companies are prohibited from transferring sensitive technologies, such as TikTok’s algorithm, without government approval under the new Chinese export controls that were implemented in 2020.
The state-run China Daily warned in an editorial last month that the export restrictions “presented a red line for the TikTok transaction.”
Dexter Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, predicted that China would make significant concessions on issues like trade, restrictions on Chinese technology, and Taiwan.
According to Roberts, “If there is anything on the Chinese side that makes them more eager to do a deal on TikTok, I think it’s because they believe they can benefit significantly from the Trump administration than they believed,” and they may be thinking about using TikTok as a bargaining leverage.
President Donald Trump’s first direct face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping since leaving the White House appears to be aimed at achieving a resolution on TikTok as soon as possible, according to Roberts.
He said, “And it seems as though he’s willing to give a lot in return to get that sit-down and that “deal”.”
The US and China both welcomed the possibility of a resolution to the conflict over TikTok, but the two countries’ perspectives on how things stand have significantly differed.
An unnamed senior White House official was quoted as telling media outlets that the Trump administration was confident that China would approve of a deal that would grant TikTok’s algorithm to a new US joint venture in a briefing on Monday.
According to reports from the official, Texas-based Oracle, whose billionaire cofounder Larry Ellison has a steadfast support for Israel, would manage and retrain the licensed algorithm using US data in accordance with the terms of the agreement.
Ellison has pledged cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure support to Israel since the start of the 2023 conflict in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 60 000 Palestinians.
Since several Republican lawmakers have accused the platform of promoting pro-Palestinian content since 2023, Oracle’s growing role in TikTok’s future has grown.
Trump, who has repeatedly foreshadowed the sale of the platform, received the most recent White House briefing after he announced on Friday that he had struck a deal with Xi during a nearly two-hour phone call.
According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the spin-off will have six Americans on its board, which will ensure that TikTok’s algorithm is “controlled by America.”
According to Jeffrey Towson, a digital strategy consultant formerly based in China, “Both the US and China now support “info-nationalism.”
“China has long emphasized that domestic information flows should not be controlled by foreign businesses or individuals. The US has now reached the same conclusion. Strong control points are made by digital platforms. What can be said, read, and watched can be shaped and constrained by them.
An agreement on the platform could de-escalate trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, according to Heiwai Tang, director of the Asia Global Institute in Hong Kong, despite the uncertainty surrounding how TikTok’s sale might go under Chinese law.
Tang told Al Jazeera, “China would gain significantly if the US’s current additional 30% tariffs on China could be lowered.”
China has only gone so far as to claim that there is a “basic framework consensus” on TikTok between the parties.
Following Xi’s call with Trump, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in a statement that “China respects the wishes of the company in question. We would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations that adhere to Chinese laws and regulations and take into account the interests of both sides.”
The Atlantic Council’s Roberts said that China’s language regarding a “framework” for resolving the TikTok dispute leaves room for negotiation and that “details like who actually gets the algorithm, which Washington has stated the US gets, could still very much be up for grabs.”
Chunmeizi Su, a lecturer on media and communications at the University of Sydney who studies platforms like TikTok, doubted that any licensing agreement would contain all of the details of TikTok’s algorithm.
The algorithm used by TikTok is “a core technology that has been applied to other apps under ByteDance,” according to the company. The company has a red line here. Su told Al Jazeera, “I think they would rather shut down TikTok US than reveal the details of their algorithms.”
The licensing agreement is only intended to provide surface-level technologies, or, to put it another way, a shell of TikTok US. And even achieving this will take time.
Although a deal on TikTok would lower US-China’s temperature, the parties would likely refrain from explicitly citing concessions in other fields, according to Charlie Chai, vice president of research at Beijing-based 86Research.
Chai told Al Jazeera, “I don’t believe there will be an explicit trade-off or receiving anything in return.” He claimed that Washington could quietly halt further tariff increases or export restrictions, but that would only be done as a “prolongation of a good-faith negotiation.”
Source: Aljazeera
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