Trump-Xi call this evening: Who will claim victory if they seal TikTok deal?

US President Donald Trump is set to pitch the TikTok deal as a victory. But the reality is complicated and the deal would be far from an American victory.

Trump is expected to finalise the TikTok deal, which would involve the sale of the platform’s US operations to a non-Chinese entity, in a call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a call on Friday. However, analysts have pointed that the stage is set for Trump to be played.

For one, TikTok means much more to Trump than it means to Xi. In the 2024 presidential election, TikTok had provided Trump a platform to connect with young voters. As the platform helped him win the election, Trump vowed to save it from a ban — irrespective of evidence-based bipartisan consensus that the platform was a propaganda outlet of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

For Xi, TikTok is essentially a low-value concession that he can give to Trump to make him believe that he has won. In return, Xi is set to extract meaningful concessions, such as tariffs, export controls on critical technology, and Taiwan.

For China, TikTok is an “an expendable concession” and gains in any deal now far outweighs costs, Dimitar Gueorguiev, the Director of Chinese Studies at Syracuse University, told The New York Times.

“Chinese officials have let the issue fester for years, holding it in reserve as a problem they could one day solve to defuse pressure from Washington. A deal now costs Beijing less than when negotiations started, while still yielding the maximum optics of compromise,” said Gueorguiev.

This means that even though Trump would project the TikTok deal as a victory, and it would be a political victory for him as the app’s continued presence would keep providing his far-right agenda a potent platform, China stands to gain much more from the deal as whatever China would extract from Trump —from export controls to tariffs— would far outweighs anything it would concede.

In any case, multiple reports have said that, even after the sale, TikTok would continue to use the Chinese algorithm. This would kill the very premise of the sale of the platform, nullifying any gain from the deal.

Xi sets stage for trade deal & summit

With the TikTok deal, Xi appears to be giving Trump something that he could project as a victory. By delivering such a personal victory, Xi appears to be laying the groundwork for the US-China trade deal and use the trade deal as a dangling carrot to host a summit with Trump in Beijing.

Even though Trump began the trade war with China with bravado, it appears that he has already conceded the war as China has leveraged its near-monopoly of rare earth supplies to the hilt.

Xi understands that “there needs to be a trade deal to pave the ground for Trump to come to China, and they want to make sure this is not retractable — that they don’t put their hearts on the table and the U.S. just stabs it with a knife”, Yun Sun, the China programme director at the Stimson Center, told The Times.