By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -China has approved the transfer agreement for the short video app TikTok, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Thursday, adding that he expects it to move forward in coming weeks and months but giving no other details.
“In Kuala Lumpur, we finalized 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,” he told Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” following President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement earlier on Thursday that the country would properly handle TikTok-related issues with the United States. A Chinese spokesperson added, “the Chinese side will work with the U.S. side to properly address issues related to TikTok.”
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 U.S. Congress passed a law in 2024 that ordered TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app’s U.S. assets by January 2025.
Trump signed an executive order on September 25 declaring that the plan to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a consortium of U.S. 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, 2026.
Trump’s order said the algorithm will be retrained and monitored by the U.S. company’s security partners, and that operation of the algorithm will be under the control of the new joint venture.
The agreement on TikTok’s U.S. 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% in TikTok U.S. to comply with requirements set out in the law that ordered it to be shut down by January 2025 if ByteDance did not sell its U.S. assets.
U.S. Representative John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, said this month that a licensing agreement for use of the TikTok algorithm, as part of the deal by ByteDance to sell U.S. assets of the short video app, would raise “serious concerns.”
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, David Lawder and David Shepardson in Washington and Maiya Keidan in Toronto; Writing by Susan Heavey; Editing by Susan Fenton and Matthew Lewis)
