Donald Trump reported on Sunday that China had a draft agreement with the United States on the sale of the Tiktok social network, due to the new customs duties imposed by Washington on Sunday.
“If I had given them a small drop in customs duties, they would have approved the agreement in 15 minutes,” the American president told journalists on the Air Force presidential plane. “It shows you the power of customs duties, right?” “, He added.
A law passed in 2024 by the US Congress required Chinese Bytedance to yield Tiktok control under penalty of ban in the United States. Shortly after his return to the White House at the end of January, Donald Trump had postponed the 75 -day deadline until April 5. He extended it again by 75 days on Friday because “the transaction requires more work”, even if he believed that he had “made a lot of progress” in this file.
Two days earlier, he announced a volley of customs duties on all American imports, and in particular 34 % on Chinese products. These customs duties are “necessary for fair and balanced exchanges between China and the United States,” said the American president.
New deadline for June 19
The sale of the American subsidiary of Tiktok requires the green light from Bytedance but also of the Chinese authorities, which have neither one nor the other, so far validated the very idea of a sale. “Key questions must still be resolved,” said Tiktok’s parent company on Friday. According to several American media, discussions were underway during the week, with the central scenario of the split of Tiktok of his parent company, which would come to that the video platform will no longer be controlled mainly by a Chinese company, the main requirement of the Congress.
The law passed in 2024 to prevent the Chinese authorities from being able to get their hands on Personal Tiktok user data in the United States or be able to influence American opinion via the powerful social network algorithm, even if no element has ever been produced to justify these fears. The deadline is now moved to June 19.
Several contenders have also come forward in recent months to buy Tiktok. This list includes in particular the “Project Liberty” of the entrepreneur Frank McCourt, owner of the Olympique de Marseille, the Youtubeur Mrbeast or the Artificial Intelligence Startup (IA) Generative Perplexity AI.
Donald Trump, after trying to force the sale of the platform in 2020, has landed, since the last American presidential campaign, as a savior of the social network at 170 million users in the United States.