China railed for years against the United States’s bid to force the sale of TikTok, once accusing Washington of demonstrating “robbers’ logic” in response to the platform’s success.
Now, Beijing is touting talks on how the video-sharing platform’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, might relinquish ownership of its US operations.
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The turnaround has raised questions about what China might expect in return, with analysts suggesting that Beijing has come to view TikTok as a useful bargaining chip to win concessions on more pressing issues.
China has yet to confirm a deal on TikTok, which Washington has cast as a propaganda tool of Beijing and a threat to privacy, and there are numerous outstanding questions about what a sale would entail.
Most crucial of all is the question of who would own and control TikTok’s recommendations algorithm, which has been credited with powering the platform’s explosive popularity in the US, where it claims more than 170 million users.
Under Chinese export controls introduced in 2020, companies are prohibited from transferring sensitive technologies like TikTok’s algorithm without government approval.
As recently as last month, the state-run China Daily warned in an editorial that the export restrictions presented a “red line for the TikTok transaction”.
If China is willing to hand over control of the algorithm, it will expect major concessions on such issues as trade, curbs on Chinese tech, and Taiwan, said Dexter Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.
“If anything changed on the Chinese side that makes them now more willing to do a deal on TikTok, I think it’s because they sense that they can get a lot more out of the Trump administration than they originally thought, and they may be contemplating using TikTok as a bargaining lever,” Roberts told Al Jazeera.
On the US side, President Donald Trump seems eager to reach an agreement on TikTok quickly as part of an effort to lock down his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping since returning to the White House, Roberts said.
“And in order to get that sit-down and that ‘deal,’ it seems as if he’s willing to give a lot in return,” he said.
While both China and the US have hailed the prospects of a resolution to the standoff over TikTok, the sides have offered substantially different accounts of where things stand.
In a briefing on Monday, an unnamed senior White House official was quoted as telling media outlets that the Trump administration was confident that China was on board with a deal that would see TikTok’s algorithm licensed out to a new joint venture in the US.
Under the terms of the deal, Texas-based Oracle, whose billionaire cofounder Larry Ellison is a staunch backer of Israel, would oversee and retrain the licensed algorithm using US data, according to reports of the official’s comment.
Since the start of the 2023 war in Gaza, in which Israel’s attacks have killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, Ellison has committed cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure support to Israel.
Oracle’s growing role in TikTok’s future comes after several Republican lawmakers have, since 2023, accused the platform of promoting pro-Palestinian content.
The latest White House briefing came after Trump, who has repeatedly extended the deadline for forcing a sale of the platform, said on Friday that he had secured a deal during a nearly two-hour-long phone conversation with Xi.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Saturday that the spin-off would see TikTok controlled by a seven-member board, filled with six Americans, and would ensure that its algorithm is “controlled by America”.
“Both the US and China now support ‘info-nationalism’,” Jeffrey Towson, a digital strategy consultant formerly based in China, told Al Jazeera.
“China has long insisted information flows be controlled domestically, and not by foreign companies or entities. The US has now come to the same conclusion. Digital platforms create powerful control points. They can shape and limit what can be said, read and watched.”
While it is unclear how the sale of TikTok might proceed under Chinese law, an agreement on the platform could mark a de-escalation in trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, said Heiwai Tang, director of the Asia Global Institute in Hong Kong.
“If the current additional 30 percent US tariffs on China could be lowered, the gain for China would be significant,” Tang told Al Jazeera.
China has only gone as far as to say that the sides have reached a “basic framework consensus” on TikTok.
“China’s position on the TikTok issue is clear: The Chinese government respects the wishes of the company in question, and would be happy to see productive commercial negotiations in keeping with market rules lead to a solution that complies with China’s laws and regulations and takes into account the interests of both sides,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement after Xi’s call with Trump.
China’s language about a “framework” for resolving the TikTok dispute leaves room for negotiations, and “details like who actually gets the algorithm – which, of course, Washington has said the US gets – could still very much be up for grabs,” the Atlantic Council’s Roberts said.
Chunmeizi Su, a media and communications lecturer at the University of Sydney, who researches platforms such as TikTok, expressed doubt that the full details of TikTok’s algorithm would be provided in any licensing deal.
“TikTok’s algorithm is not just about TikTok; it’s a core technology that has been used among other apps under ByteDance. There is a red line here for the company. I believe they would rather shut down TikTok US altogether than reveal the details of their algorithms,” Su told Al Jazeera.
“If this is the bottom line, it means that the licensing deal will only provide surface-level technologies, or, in other words, a shell of TikTok US. And even this will take a long time to achieve.”
Though a deal on TikTok would lower the temperature between the US and China, the sides would probably avoid explicitly linking the sale to concessions in other areas, said Charlie Chai, vice head of research at Beijing-based 86Research.
“I don’t think there will be explicit trade-off or getting anything in return”, Chai told Al Jazeera. Washington could quietly delay new tariffs or export restrictions later, he said, but that would be done as “an extension of a good-faith negotiation”.
“It is important to preserve the political optics that no explicit trade was made at the expense of supposedly non-negotiable core interests, which can easily lead to allegations that neither Beijing nor Washington wants to face,” Chai added.