United States President Donald Trump and China President Xi Jinping began a conversation on Friday to define the future of Tiktok and possibly relieve commercial tensions between the two largest economies in the world.
According to a statement from the White House, the call began at 8am in Washington time (9am in Brasilia).
Leaders discuss a preliminary agreement presented this week to transfer control of Tiktok operations in the USA from Chinese Bytedance Ltd. to an American investor consortium.
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The details of the hit have not yet been released, and Trump kept caution in an interview with Fox News aired on Thursday (18). “It looks like they approved Tiktok, and Tiktok represents a lot of money for the United States, so that was good, but let’s see how it all works,” he said.
The connection is the first since June, amid disputes on commercial restrictions that reach strategic sectors such as semiconductors and rare land. This includes the dispute over Nvidia Corp’s access. To China, now limited by US export controls and Beijing’s efforts to reduce local demand for its products. “We are very close to agreements on all this,” Trump said, adding that his relationship with China “is very good.”
Contact can make way for a face -to -face meeting, the first since Trump returned to the White House. The meeting would include a broader agenda, such as the expectation of a Chinese request of Boeing Co. aircraft and discussions about geopolitical crises ongoing in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Southern Sea of China.
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Trump’s willingness to prioritize a transactional agreement on Tiktok left in the background national security concerns that supported the bipartisan law that initially set January as a deadline for selling the application. The president has already signed executive orders extending the deadline, although his legal basis for keeping the app in operation remains uncertain. “There is a huge value, and I hate to give up that value. I prefer to reap the benefits,” Trump said on Thursday after a London meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Stmerer.
The unnamed arrangement predicts that Bytedance has up to 20% of the operation, while the other investors would include Oracle Corp., Andreessen Horowitz and Private Equity manager Silver Lake Management LLC, according to people. Trump stated in London that the company would be “totally American investors” and “companies that love America,” but avoided responding if the app will need a new algorithm.
Henrietta Levin, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said a model in which technology continues under Chinese control would be seen by Beijing as a success, but would contradict “what the law actually demands, which is the American corporate property of this capacity.”
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For Steve Yates, a researcher at Heritage Foundation, Trump must be ready to abandon the deal if Xi does not meet expectations about the algorithm. “If there is failures and no compliance, the president needs to play the threat and remove the Tiktok from the US market until it fits the requirements,” he said.
Trump, formerly Tiktok’s critic, has changed his position and attributes to the application part of the support of young people in last year’s elections. “The young people wanted that a lot,” he told reporters on Tuesday, adding that he received parents’ calls saying they would be “in trouble with their children” if the deal did not come out.
Nvidia, which leads the global artificial intelligence chips industry, closely follows the connection, as well as Bytedance. The company pressures the Trump government to make it flexible the restrictions on AI chip exports to Chinese customers. At the same time, authorities in Beijing accused the company of violating antitrust laws and have been encouraging local companies to replace Nvidia products with domestic alternatives.
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Nvidia’s future will be a test of the relationship that CEO Jensen Huang has been cultivating with Trump since January. Huang promised to invest up to $ 500 billion in USA infrastructure in the US, a promise that pleases the president. The executive followed part of Trump’s trip to the United Kingdom, where the president even played: “You are dominating the world, Jensen. I don’t know what they are doing here. I hope it’s right.”
US and China also live a truce until November in a tariff war that even raised US tariffs to 145%. There is still a 20% rate as a pressure to contain the flow of fentanyl and inputs used in its production. Trump said on Thursday that “a much larger scale, we are very close to an agreement,” but his position may be affected by a supreme court decision on the legality of one of the tariff tools used to impose tariffs on China.
While the truce is undefined after the last length, Yates assessed that “there is no expectation of immediate results.” Trump, in turn, has pressured allies to expand sanctions against China and India as a way to increase economic pressure on Vladimir Putin and end the war in Ukraine.
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