US President Donald Trump claimed the fate of the TikTok application in the United States is still in the air, but corroborated that China will eventually determine the fate of the app as there are negotiations being conducted.
"I might, I might not. We are negotiating on TikTok today. We might let it go out of business, or we might, I don't know. It all depends, to China. Doesn't matter much. I would like to do it for the kids. They like it," Trump said to reporters in New Jersey as he prepared to return to Washington.
"I mean, selfishly, I did just awesomely on TikTok, and I won the youth vote. I received numbers nobody's ever even come close to in the Republican Party, nobody," he stated.
According to The New York Times, Trump has until September 17 to implement or delay a law forcing TikTok to be separated from Chinese parent company ByteDance or risk being banned from the US.
The president already postponed the enforcement of the law three times. Last year, members of Congress voted on the bipartisan bill to prohibit TikTok in the nation unless it is able to secure a non-Chinese owner since there were fears that the social media application's Chinese connection made it a national security risk to the US, The New York Times adds.
Negotiations with China have been complicated. Trump imposed 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports in April and suspended the trade before dropping that tax to 30 percent. China imposed 10 percent tariffs on U.S. products.
China stated on Saturday that it would start investigating the export of some microchips produced in the US. The US Commerce Department had the previous day said it would put Chinese chip firms on a trade blacklist list. The actions are likely to add pressure to the negotiations.
The world's two largest economies have been negotiating further tariff reductions and China's export restriction on rare earth materials and magnets vital to US manufacturers. The Trump administration is also concerned that Beijing has suspended purchases of US agricultural products, threatening the livelihood of soybean growers.
Bessent has condemned China's excess industrial capacity as unbalanced and called on his Chinese counterparts to suspend imports of Russian and Iranian oil.
Trump and China's President Xi Jinping may sit down with each other later this month at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in South Korea. Trump has also dropped a veiled suggestion that he might one day visit China at Xi's invitation.
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