For eight months, TikTok has been operating in America in breach of the law, kept alive by Donald Trump’s executive orders that may also have been in breach of that law. Now, it appears, the Chinese-controlled app may be about to be legalised.

On Tuesday, US and Chinese negotiators reached a “framework” agreement that envisages the sale of ByteDance’s US business to a combination of new US investors and its own US shareholders.

“We have a deal on TikTok,” Donald Trump announced on Tuesday. “We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it.”Credit: Bloomberg

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who, with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, met their Chinese counterparts, said the Chinese had come in with “a big list of asks,” which he said they described as compensation.

“With the leverage that President Trump had given Ambassador Greer and myself we were able to disabuse them of the notion that we had room for big gives,” Bessent said.

“Basically, what they got was a promise of things that won’t happen, rather than taking things off,” he said. Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk on Friday to try to finalise the deal.

To buy time to complete the deal, Trump has issued his fourth executive order this year directing the US attorney-general not to enforce the provisions of a bi-partisan law, passed by the US Congress last year, which gave ByteDance a year to sell its US operations to a non-Chinese owner.

One of the oddities of the whole TikTok saga has been the importance and priority Trump and his administration has assigned it.

That initial period of grace expired on January 19 – the day before Trump was........

© The Sydney Morning Herald