US Treasury's Bessent says China has approved TikTok transfer deal

Tok’s future uncertain as US law orders Chinese owner ByteDance to sell its US assets by Jan 2025

China has approved the transfer agreement for the short video app TikTok, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday, adding that he expects it to move forward in the coming weeks and months but gave no further details.

“In Kuala Lumpur, we finalised the TikTok agreement in terms of getting Chinese approval, and I would expect that would go forward in the coming weeks and months, and we’ll finally see a resolution to that,” Bessent told Fox Business Network following President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement earlier on Thursday that it would “properly handle TikTok-related issues with the United States.”

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TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, did not immediately comment.

The fate of the app, used by 170 million Americans, has remained uncertain for more than 18 months after the US Congress passed a law in 2024 requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app’s US assets by January 2025.

Trump signed an executive order on September 25 declaring that the plan to sell TikTok’s US operations to a consortium of US and global investors meets the national security requirements set out in the 2024 law and gave them 120 days to complete the transaction. He also delayed enforcement of the law until January 20.

Trump’s order said the algorithm would be retrained and monitored by the US company’s security partners, and operation of the algorithm would be under the control of the new joint venture.

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The agreement on TikTok’s US operations includes the appointment by ByteDance of one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the other six seats.

ByteDance would hold less than 20% of TikTok US to comply with the law’s requirements, which mandate that the app be shut down by January 2025 if ByteDance does not sell its US assets.

Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, said earlier this month that a licensing agreement for use of the TikTok algorithm, as part of a deal by ByteDance to sell the US assets of the short video app, would raise “serious concerns.”