It really depends on whether “TikTok” refers to TikTok Global, which is the entire worldwide platform beyond China, or some potential TikTok US entity geo-locked for Americans akin to Douyin.

If it’s the former, then China lost big time - no other way to put it. If it’s the latter, then it’s the next best case scenario other than taking the ball home entirely and eating the US ban threat. There would then be three TikToks: TikTok Global, TikTok US and Douyin.

To put it simply, China loses in every scenario because it’s important to remember that the US made up this TikTok threat out of nowhere. There’s no way something like this would have been tolerated in a UNO reverse card scenario and, in fact, it wasn’t with US social media forays in China. Facebook and Google chose to leave the Chinese market entirely rather than address basic Chinese concerns like “stop algorithmically boosting color revolution slop against us to your top results,” let alone concede to demands to access their core backend infrastructure. But this is the nature of being in a world subjected to US hegemony and the cost of doing business in a global system where the US market is held up as indispensable. Just like the tariffs, it’s a matter of fighting to concede and lose the least.

TikTok could just take the example of its US counterparts and simply leave the US market. There would likely be a bandwagon effect where the app is blocked from much of the West, but would largely remain for the Global South. For an ephemeral moment, this would be an undeniable moral victory in demonstrating Western censorship and hypocrisy - until the NYT inevitably cooks up a damage-control narrative about TikTok requiring daily Aztec-style human sacrifices of [insert the West’s repressed Chinese minority of the week] to run and this allows global libs the excuse to own and celebrate the censorship, “morality” really seems to be that simple nowadays. Though it’s possible that TikTok de-burgerfied would become some unique Global South social media haven, I think it’s more likely that the loss of the US user base would cause a slow overall decline in TikTok because (as we saw with us Euro sheep flocking to XHS in January simply because the Americans went there) some sections of the worldwide user base would flock to alternate apps to remain with their dominant US-based influencers, causing decreased engagement on the platform, causing more of a user drain in a cyclical feedback loop.

For whatever reason, China has decided against that. It’s interesting that the government has explicitly stepped in to negotiate for TikTok since it’s been speculated that Xi had skipped the Brazil summit this year when Lula’s wife broke diplomatic protocol by requesting that he intervene against TikTok’s lack of moderation, basically insinuating that the Chinese government had control over a private company, which (may be true, but also) would have been great ammunition for the West.

In a sense, I’d say the Chinese government intervened because it came to see TikTok as a test case for how Chinese companies can be begrudgingly accepted with gritted teeth by the West in the geopolitical climate of the New Cold War. With the contemporary hostility, there’s been only two choices for such companies: complete surrender to the US or accept a total ban from Western markets. If China handles this well, it could set a working precedent for a third path, allowing the US to take its victory lap and claim a face-saving win, while still relying on a system built by China. On the surface, the company might get an American flag sticker slapped on it, under “licensing,” but the actual substance remains firmly in Chinese ownership. This modus vivendi is just how the game has to be played until the moment comes when such hegemonic expressions of asymmetry no longer can hold such sway.

I assume their logic is “We make your tech companies do what we want if they want to operate in China, so we will play ball in the US”.

China seems to have almost no serious interest in amassing soft power worldwide.

Giving up TikTok is giving up a great tool to build that power. Perhaps building sympathy for Palestine does not serve their interests (it does, but perhaps they don’t believe so) but whenever the next crisis comes along they may well regret not having it.

On the bright side, the US is claiming that they need to change the algorithm from a “Chinese algorithm” but it will be easy because of AI. In other words, they’re gonna break it.

TikTok is already under heavy influence of the west it’s not a tool of the Chinese government but a tool of the Chinese capital. Does it really matter if this Capital is Chinese, Taiwanese, South Korean, Russian or American? It doesn’t because one way or another it still only serves the global interests of capitalists

At least that’s my perspective