China has long supported a US bid to force the sale of Tiktok, which it accused Washington of demonstrating “logic of robbery” in response to the success of its platform.
Currently, Beijing is promoting a talk about how bytedance, the Chinese owner of video sharing platform, will waive ownership of its US business.
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The turnaround raises questions about what China might expect in return, suggesting that analysts have come to view Tiktok as a useful negotiation tip to win concessions on more pressing issues.
China has yet to confirm any deals on Tiktok, which Washington has cast as Beijing’s propaganda tool and as a threat to privacy.
The most important thing overall is the issue of those who own and control Tiktok’s recommendation algorithms. This is acknowledged to have fueled the explosive popularity of the platform in the US, claiming more than 170 million users.
Under China’s export control introduced in 2020, businesses are prohibited from transferring sensitive technologies like Tiktok’s algorithms without government approval.
Just like last month, state-run China’s Daily Editorial warned that export restrictions presented a “red line for tiktok trade.”
If China is willing to hand over the management of its algorithms, Dexter Roberts, a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, will hope for key concessions on issues such as Chinese technology curbs and Taiwan.
“If anything changes on China’s part, if they’re willing to do more deals in Tiktok, I think it’s because they feel they can get from the Trump administration a lot more than they originally thought, and they may be thinking of using Tiktok as a negotiation lever,” Roberts told Al Jazera.
On the US side, President Donald Trump appears to be eager to reach an agreement on Tiktok as part of his efforts to lock down his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping since returning to the White House, Roberts said.
“And it seems he wants to give more in return to get that sit-in and that ‘trading’,” he said.
Both China and the US have welcomed the prospects for a standoff resolution for Tiktok, but the sides offer quite different explanations of where things are.
At a briefing Monday, an unnamed senior White House official was quoted as telling the media that he was confident that China is on the licensing deal that Tiktok’s algorithms are approved for a new US joint venture.
The Texas-based Oracle, whose billionaire co-founder Larry Ellison is a solid supporter of Israel, will use US data to oversee and retrain licensed algorithms, according to reports in the agency’s comments.
Ever since the start of the 2023 war in Gaza, in which Israeli attacks killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, Ellison has committed to Israel with support for cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure.
The growing role of Oracle in Tiktok’s future comes after Republican lawmakers have accused several Republican lawmakers of promoting pro-Palestinian content since 2023.
The latest White House Briefing said Trump, who repeatedly extended the deadline to enforce the platform’s sales, secured the deal on Friday in a nearly two-hour phone conversation with XI.
White House spokesman Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday that the spinoff will ensure that Tiktok will be controlled by a seven-man board filled with six Americans, ensuring that the algorithm will be “controlled by the US.”
“Today, both the US and China support ‘information nationalism’,” Jeffrey Towson, a former China-based digital strategy consultant, told Al Jazeera.
“For a long time, China has argued that information flows within the country are controlled domestically, not foreign companies or organizations. The US has reached the same conclusion: Digital platforms create strong points of control.
It is unclear how Tiktok sales will proceed under Chinese law, but the platform agreement could mark an escalation in the trade tension between Washington and Beijing, said Haywai Tang, director of Hong Kong’s Asia Global Studies Institute.
“If we can lower the current 30% US tariffs on China, China’s interests will be important,” Tan told Al Jazeera.
China is simply saying it has reached Tiktok’s “basic framework consensus.”
“China’s position on the Tiktok issue is clear. The Chinese government respects the wishes of the company in question and is happy to see that productive commercial negotiations in line with market rules will comply with Chinese laws and regulations and lead to solutions that take into account the interests of both parties.”
The Chinese language about the “framework” to resolve the Tiktok conflict has left room for negotiation, and “details like those who actually got the algorithm — of course, Washington said the US got — can still be obtained,” said Roberts of the Atlantic Council.
Chunmeizi Su, a media and correspondence lecturer at the University of Sydney, has been researching platforms such as Tiktok and has expressed doubt that details of Tiktok algorithms will be provided in any licensing transaction.
“Tiktok’s algorithm is not just Tiktok. This is the core technology used among other apps under the signature. Here, I think it will shut down Tiktok us rather than completely shutting down Tiktok Us,” Su told Al Jazeera.
“If this is the bottom row, the licensing agreement means providing only surface-level technology, that is, a shell of Tiktok.
The deal on Tiktok would lower the temperature between the US and China, but perhaps the side would avoid explicitly linking sales to concessions in other regions, said Charlie Chai, assistant director of research at Beijing-based 86 Research.
“I don’t think we’ll get anything explicit trade-offs or anything in return,” Chai told Al Jazeera. Washington could quietly delay new tariffs and export restrictions later, he said, but that would be done as an “extension of honest negotiations.”
“It is important to maintain the political optics that explicit trade was not carried out at the expense of non-negotiable core interests.
