The transfer agreement for the viral social media app TikTok has been approved by China, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
Without giving further details, Bessent said on Thursday he expects the deal to move forward in the upcoming weeks and months.
Early Thursday morning, China’s Commerce Ministry said it would properly handle TikTok-related issues with the U.S.
TikTok, which is owned by China-based ByteDance, did not immediately comment on the deal.
“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.
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 Sept. 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 until Jan. 20 the enforcement of the law.
Trump’s order said the algorithm will be retrained and monitored by the U.S. company’s security partners, and 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.
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 a deal by ByteDance to sell U.S. assets of the short video app, would raise “serious concerns.”
