Washington (AFP) – US President Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping spoke by phone Friday with expectations that they were set to finalize the fate of the hugely popular and influential video app TikTok, as well as discussing trade. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV and the Xinhua news agency said the call had started. Trump previewed his talks on Thursday, telling Fox News that they would be discussing “TikTok and also trade.”
“And we’re very close to deals on all of it. And my relationship with China is very good,” he said. The call was their second since Trump began his second term in January. On June 5, the US president said Xi had invited him to visit China, and he issued a similar invitation for the Chinese leader to come to the United States. So far, no travel plans have been made, but several analysts expected Xi to repeat his offer Friday, playing on Trump’s enthusiasm for lavish receptions in foreign capitals.
TikTok – “Each leader will aim to signal that he has outmaneuvered the other” in trade talks focused on tariffs, Ali Wyne, an expert on US-China relations at the International Crisis Group, predicted in a note. The pair could settle the TikTok drama, after Trump repeatedly put off a ban under a US law designed to force Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its US operations for national security reasons. Trump told reporters on Thursday that he hoped to “finalize something on TikTok.”
Under the deal, TikTok’s US business would be “owned by all American investors, and very rich people and companies,” Trump said. He stated that he believes TikTok had boosted his appeal to younger voters and helped him win the 2024 election. The president on Tuesday again pushed back applying a ban on the app, which had been decided under his predecessor, President Joe Biden. The Wall Street Journal raised the possibility of a consortium to control TikTok that would include tech giant Oracle and two California investment funds — Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.
Tariffs – The telephone talks come as the world’s two biggest economies seek to find a compromise on tariffs. Both sides dramatically hiked tariffs against each other during a months-long dispute earlier this year, disrupting global supply chains. Washington and Beijing then reached a deal to reduce levies, which expires in November, with the United States imposing 30 percent duties on imports of Chinese goods and China hitting US products with a 10 percent tariff.
The phone meeting also comes after Xi organized a major summit this month with the leaders of Russia and India — and invited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to observe a major military parade in Beijing. “Please give my warmest regards to (Russian President) Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against the United States of America,” Trump wrote to Xi on his Truth Social platform. The US leader slammed India with punitive tariffs for its oil purchases from Moscow and has called on European countries to sanction China for buying Russian oil, though Washington has not itself sanctioned Beijing.
“If they did that on China, I think the war (in Ukraine) would maybe end,” Trump told Fox News.
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