Did Donald Trump exaggerate his meeting with Xi Jinping? On the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific summit, the US president and his Chinese counterpart met in South Korea for the first time in several years. All smiles, Donald Trump rated this meeting a “12 out of 10,” suggesting a major diplomatic turning point has just been reached. But behind the enthusiastic statements, the reality seems more nuanced: while some symbolic progress has been made, deep disagreements between Washington and Beijing remain unresolved.
Beijing agreed to suspend export restrictions on rare earth technologies, essential for the global industry, for one year. A gesture of appeasement following US threats to impose excessive taxes on Chinese products. Trump welcomes it, but this truce remains precarious: China retains control over a strategic resource that could be rapidly rearmed.
Tiktok, still at a standstill
Another hot topic: Tiktok. Despite the optimistic announcements made a few days ago by the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, Scott Bessent, no concrete common ground has been found. Washington continues to demand that the app’s US operations be removed from the control of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, in the name of national security.
Beijing, for its part, adopts a more cautious attitude and refuses to give its final agreement. “We will see a resolution in the coming weeks and months,” said Scott Bessent. For the moment, the two powers remain stagnant in their positions.
According to the New York TimesThe fate of TikTok in the United States remains “still unclear” despite the meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. The American newspaper highlights that Beijing was evasive and limited itself to mentioning the desire to “properly resolve the problems” related to TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, while Trump did not address the issue.
Discussions thus focus on a possible transfer of TikTok’s US activities to a consortium of investors, including Oracle, so that the US version of the application is “majority controlled by Americans”, in accordance with the 2024 national security law, signed under Biden and extended by Trump, whose deadline is now set in January 2026.
A visit with mixed results
If this deal comes to fruition, it would defuse a major point of tension between Beijing and Washington and impact the future of ByteDance, valued at $400 billion. The move would also influence the social media landscape in the United States, where TikTok competes with giants like Meta and Google. But after months of tweets and major announcements from the Trump administration, it’s clear the ball is still in China’s court.
Beyond the thunderous announcements around TikTok, this meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping highlights the complexity of a now structural rivalry between the two largest economies in the world. Trump hoped to impose his hard line. Xi Jinping, for his part, showed that he knew how to subdue Washington by playing the economic card. Although the debates made it possible to avoid a new escalation, none of the key issues (Tiktok, semiconductors, artificial intelligence) have really moved forward. Trump’s “score of 12 out of 10” seems, in the end, very generous.
Source: BFM TV
