China agrees with negotiations on the sale of Tiktok in the United States to an American buyer. In a telephone conversation on Friday, US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping discussed that transfer, among other things. There is no question of a completed sale.
Moreover, according to a Chinese report XI hopes that the Staatspersbureau distributed that the US office distributed will ensure an ‘open, honest, and non-discriminatory commercial climate for Chinese companies that want to invest in the US’.
“Unilateral commercial restrictions” that undermine the result of earlier conversations must omit the US according to the report. Washington has imposed high import duties this year and limits the export of advanced technology to China.
In the phone call, both presidents agreed to meet at the end of October in South Korea, where they attend a meeting from APEC, an economic partnership of countries in Asia and the Pacific. At the beginning of next year, Trump will also travel to China for an official visit, he announced on Friday. A return visit from XI to the US will follow later.
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Tap-ban
The popular platform Tiktok, with around 170 million users in the US, is owned by Chinese Bytedance. Politicians in Washington therefore fear that information from American users can fall into the hands of the Chinese government. They are also afraid that China could use Tiktok to manipulate public opinion in the US.
The congress sets the sale of the American activities of Tiktok as a condition for averting a proposed prohibition of the social medium. Trump has postponed that ban a few times. “I love Tiktok,” Trump said on Thursday in an interview with Fox News. “It helped me to win the elections.” In August the White House even opened an account on the platform.
I love Tiktok. It helped me to win the elections
Earlier this week, after negotiations in Madrid, an agreement already seemed to be: a consortium consisting of, among others, Tech company Oracle and the venture investors Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake would, according to American media, would get an interest of 80 percent in the American branch of the platform. Further details, for example about control over the algorithm behind the app, remained unclear. Conversations about the sale can now continue.
Soy
For Beijing, a Tiktok deal is a root in negotiations in which it also uses the stick. For example, Bloomberg reported on Friday that China did not order an American soy for the first time in almost thirty years at the start of the harvest season. China is the largest buyer of this, and soy farmers in traditional Republican states are an important voter group for Trump.
Moreover, China has subjected the output of rare earth metals to the US (and Europe) to strict rules. Earlier this year, for example, Western car manufacturers ran into problems. The European Chamber of Commerce in China warned this week That European companies also regularly have to stop their production due to deficits to those crucial raw materials.
Drugs and semiconductors
China and the US have become embroiled in a severe trade war, after Donald Trump imposed high import duties on the country to straighten the unfair imbalance in mutual trade. Due to a series of taxes and countertinations, the mutual import rates increased to well above 100 percent.
After consultation in Geneva in May, those taxes were partly suspended in May, but unlike many other countries, the US has not yet reached the definitive agreement with China. A breakthrough was also not made in Friday’s bell.
That is because in the complicated relationship between the two largest economies in the world there are many more disputes. Trump blames China for, for example, doing too little to tackle trade in raw materials for the highly addictive agent Fentanyl, which causes many drug deaths in the US. Partly for that reason, China received a criminal tax of 20 percent earlier this year on top of the ‘normal’ import duties.
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China is angry about the American limitations on the export to China of advanced semiconductors or technology to produce them, with which Washington tries China’s according to Beijing (in vain) right to development limit. As a counter-move, China forbade the use of NVIDIA chips this week and started a competition study into the American company.
All those problems with the phone call from the two presidents, the second since Trumps took office in January, are not off the world. And then even greater geopolitical issues play a role: according to Washington, China maintains the Russian war machine in Ukraine by buying oil from Russia, and Beijing was displayed last week over the passage of an American and a British navy ship through the Strait of Taiwan. The two countries also fight about one Chinese plan To set a nature reserve around a disputed Atol in the South China Sea.
At the beginning of this month, Trump responded to a large military parade in Beijing, commemorating the end of the Second World War. Russian President Vladimir Putin and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were guests. On Truth Social said written The American president to Xi that he had to give the duo the warm regards “while they are being together against the US.” By Chinese report From Friday’s telephone conversation, however, Trump de Parade would now have called “magnificent”.
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