China ‘ready’ to deal with US over TikTok. Japan’s ruling LDP elects Yoshihide Suga as leader. Aug 31: US, China ‘willing to proceed’ on TikTok – The United States and China are set to take action against each other in a row over trade, as the US is expected to impose new tariffs on Chinese goods today.
Last month, Bessent had already announced that Spain and the United States had agreed on a “framework” for the deal after talks in Madrid, where things were then further smoothed over by President Donald Trump signing an executive order to greenlight the transaction.
In an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation that aired Sunday morning, Bessent said that the U.S. and China have agreed “on a final deal around TikTok.”
“We’ve got to one in Madrid, and I sense that as of today all these things are fine, and it will be for the two leaders to take this particular transaction home on Thursday in Korea,” Bessent said. He would not comment on the terms of the agreement, but said, “My goal was to get the Chinese to agree to approve this transaction, and I think we succeeded in that over the last two days.”
Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline of a law that mandates TikTok’s owner, the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States.
His executive order stipulates that TikTok’s U.S. operations and data, including its recommendation algorithm, source code, and content moderation, will fall under a new board of directors in the United States; Oracle will oversee security operations.
Oracle (whose chairman, Larry Ellison, is a Trump supporter), the owner of Fox News, Fox Corp., Andreessen Horowitz, and Silver Lake Management have been reported as backers of the new joint venture; Fox’s involvement was in fact confirmed by Trump.
Bessent made today’s remarks in a presentation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Chinese and American trade negotiators also announced they had agreed on the outlines of an accord to roll back tariffs and resolve other trade issues.
Rare earth minerals were addressed in the discussion, although it’s not clear how, U.S. trade negotiator Jamieson Greer told reporters. (China has made similar threats about tightening export controls on those minerals, crucial for the manufacture of semiconductors and other tech products.)
“Our discussion was about prolonging the truce; we discussed rare earths, of course, we discussed all sorts of things,” Greer said.
