Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: U.S. President Donald Trump’s extension offer for TikTok to find a new buyer leaves the app’s future up to China, Taiwan faces a constitutional crisis in the wake of three controversial laws passed in December, and Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks to Trump on the phone—and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.
Sign up to receive China Brief in your inbox every Tuesday.
Sign Up
By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.
Enter your email
Sign Up
TikTok’s Future Is Up to the CCP
U.S. President Donald Trump, newly ensconced in the White House, has offered Chinese-owned social media app TikTok a 75-day extension to find a buyer. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law demanding its parent company, ByteDance, sell the platform; it went into effect on Jan. 19.
TikTok went offline in the United States late on Jan. 19 and resumed service less than 24 hours later on Inauguration Day, with a message of thanks to Trump. What matters now isn’t TikTok’s decisions, but those of ByteDance—and ByteDance, as a Chinese company, can’t make independent decisions on a matter of geopolitical import by itself.
That means that TikTok’s future is up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and how China’s leaders respond could offer some important clues for the near-term future of the U.S.-China relationship.
Trump’s extension offer is dubiously legal. The law allowed for a 90-day extension if there was progress toward a deal before it took effect. Oracle, TikTok’s server host in the United States, seems to be betting that Trump’s move won’t be challenged in court. Other firms that could face fines are less certain, which is why TikTok hasn’t returned to Apple’s App Store or Google Play.
So, what happens next? One scenario is that a deal is put together in the next 75 days, and ByteDance sells TikTok to a U.S. company or another foreign buyer.
This would be the smartest approach on China’s part, and it would also mean that Beijing is able to take advantage of Trump’s cupidity in a way that it wasn’t during his first term. Trump has always been open to deals, but China made no offers amid the downward spiral of the bilateral relationship post-2016.
A deal along the lines that Trump has laid out vaguely—where “the United States of America own[s] 50 percent of TikTok”—could leave Beijing effectively in control of the app’s data and likely its content algorithms, if the other half remains in the hands of ByteDance.
Under this arrangement, TikTok could be used to promote right-wing propaganda in the United States if it doesn’t touch on China. This would show that Beijing’s understanding of U.S. politics has grown—that officials were willing to block a sale until the new administration offered a better deal, rather than seeing both former President Joe Biden and Trump as part of continued hostility toward China.
Even an outright sale of TikTok to a Trump ally would indicate that China is willing to offer deals that appeal to Trump’s personal interests in return for concessions elsewhere, whether that is over Taiwan’s security, expansionism in the South China Sea, or trade deals.
Before the inauguration, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with both U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Elon Musk—who Beijing is rumored to have considered as a potential TikTok buyer. Still, the conversation might have been about the future of Musk’s Tesla factories in China and tariffs. Regardless, China seems to see Musk as a useful backdoor.
However, it still seems unlikely to me that China is ready to order ByteDance to sell TikTok. Chinese official statements and state media are still hostile to the idea, and there is institutional reluctance in Beijing to trust Trump. Marxist theory—at least as the CCP interprets it—offers little room for understanding such a chaotic figure, preferring to see him as an instrument of wider political forces.
If there is no sale, it is possible that Trump—eager to keep a major social media platform on his side—attempts to force the issue anyway. He could pressure congressional Republicans to rescind the TikTok ban with a new law or offer future extensions despite the law’s text. Even before the law took effect, right-wing content was already booming on the app.
The law passed overwhelmingly last year, but it’s possible that new pressure from Trump and from Democrats such as California Rep. Ro Khanna, who are eager to appeal to Big Tech, could force through a new bill that would cancel out the old one. Either way, the legal uncertainty would likely last for months, reinforcing the Chinese leadership’s convictions that Washington is an inherently unreliable partner.
The last option is that a frustrated Trump allows the ban to be enforced, setting the tone for further confrontations with China. This would strengthen the idea of Washington’s implacable hostility toward Beijing and probably render operations even more difficult for U.S. firms within China’s borders.
Ultimately, that is the only option that doesn’t create a clash inside the Trump administration between sincere China hawks and the president’s more transactional backers. In private group chats, Republican intelligence and security staffers are already expressing anger about images of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew sitting next to director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard at the inauguration.
Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Pete Ricketts, among others, have already spoken out against any concessions to ByteDance. Newly anointed Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been silent, but given his past positions, it’s unlikely that he supports Trump’s extension. All of this foreshadows future (and perhaps more serious) clashes if Trump tries to strike bargains with Beijing.
What We’re Following
Taiwan’s constitutional crisis. The Taiwanese government is facing a major crisis after the passage of three controversial bills in its parliament, the Legislative Yuan, last December. The Legislative Yuan is controlled by the opposition party, Kuomintang (KMT), which is generally seen as pro-China; the Democratic Progressive Party holds the presidency.
The laws made major changes to Taiwan’s Constitutional Court, which would normally require the court itself to decide on their legitimacy. But the court is currently paralyzed, since the KMT has blocked the appointment of new judges, leaving it with just eight out of 15—not enough to reach the two-thirds quorum that the new laws demand.
Taiwanese politics is contentious, with disagreement in the Legislative Yuan sometimes delving into physical fights. But the intensity of the latest clash, especially as the parliament attempts to slash President Lai Ching-te’s proposed budget, is unusual. Taiwan is already struggling to show that it can defend itself against China; prolonged crisis could empower hawks in Beijing.
Xi’s phone calls. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first conversation with Trump since 2021—held on Jan. 17 before the U.S. president took office—went relatively smoothly. Trump’s threatened tariffs against China have not materialized—though it’s unclear if that’s because he’s trying to bargain with Beijing or because of opposition among his business allies.
Notably, Xi’s conversation with Trump was followed by a much longer call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Jan. 21, emphasizing Beijing’s de facto alliance with Moscow. The two calls are a reminder that U.S.-China relations are now tangled up with Russia’s war in Ukraine, where China has provided both rhetorical backing and material aid.
Trump could seek a grand autocratic deal to resolve the Russia-Ukraine war on terms favorable to Putin, but many Republican hawks have emphasized China’s role in the war and might be unhappy with any attempt at a bargain.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Tech and Business
ByteDance dilemmas. It’s not just TikTok that is banned from U.S. app stores, but a wide range of parent company ByteDance’s products. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of TikTok users have shifted over to Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media app, which is now struggling to make sure that new accounts are properly censored.
Like all successful Chinese businesses, Xiaohongshu has extensive ties to the CCP, which raises the bigger question: Do bans on individual apps or companies make sense, given the demands that Beijing makes of every firm? Or will the United States move toward rules like those of India, where there is a broad ban of Chinese apps?
China has effectively walled off its internet from the rest of the world. Does the United States’ internet need to be walled off from China, or are Americans confident in an era of domestic and foreign disinformation that the best speech will win out?
GDP growth targets lowered. A tone of pessimism—or realism—has settled within Chinese local governments, with half of them setting lower GDP growth targets for 2025 compared to last year. (The average growth target is 5.26 percent; in 2024, it was 5.41 percent.) The central government will announce an overall growth target on March 5, and it is likely to hover around 5 percent.
Chinese provincial GDP figures always exceed those of the central government: Local leaders are judged in part on their success in boosting GDP, and Chinese statistics are highly unreliable. Even the dampened targets might still be unrealistic as the Chinese economy struggles to find a post-COVID foothold and local governments face a massive fiscal crisis.
The post TikTok Debate Could Stir White House Clash appeared first on Foreign Policy.
