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Trump, Xi, and the new US–China standoff
US–China relations are once again on edge. After Washington expanded export controls on Chinese tech firms, Beijing struck back with new limits on critical minerals. President Trump responded by threatening 100% tariffs, then quickly walked them back.
Ian Bremmer says neither side wants a full trade war: “Trump doesn’t want to risk inflation or crash the markets, and Xi knows both countries have real leverage over each other.”
As Trump and Xi prepare to meet, from TikTok control to Taiwan tensions, Ian explains why “this relationship is tense, but not heading for a blow-up.”
In this photo illustration, TikTok logo is displayed on a smartphone with the national flags of China and the United States in the background.
What We’re Watching: Trump and Xi’s Friday phone call, EU introduces new Russia sanctions, US plots Afghanistan return
The world’s most powerful pairing talk TikTok and trade
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly discussed how they can keep TikTok online in the United States and whether they can ease trade tensions during a phone call Friday morning, their first since June. The topic of trade is a thorny one, most recently due to disputes over Nvidia chip purchases. As for TikTok, the two superpowers were expected to finalize a deal for the sale of the social media app – a consortium of US firms is set to control the company. If the TikTok deal is completed, it’s possible that Trump and Xi could meet in person during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit being held in South Korea around Halloween.
EU introduces new sanctions on Russia
The European Union rolled out its 19th sanctions package to squeeze Russia’s war chest, pledging to end Russian liquified natural gas (LNG) imports by early 2027, blacklist 560 oil tankers, and target crypto platforms and Chinese firms doing business with Moscow. The package still needs to gain the approval of the 27-member bloc, but is expected to be adopted, and comes as Trump has said he is ready to sanction Russia but only if European nations stop purchasing Russian oil.
Is the US about to return to Afghanistan?
Trump declared Thursday that he wants the US military to regain control of the Bagram air base, a move that would return American troops to Afghanistan four years after withdrawal from the Taliban-held state. The move is all about China: the US has become increasingly wary of Beijing’s growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, and Trump highlighted the base’s proximity to the Asian giant as a reason to take it back. Actually regaining Bagram would require cooperating with the Taliban, a once-hostile foe of Washington. The two sides have been talking, but the noises right now suggest that a return to Bagram won’t be easy.Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, on October 23, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Modi to meet Xi, European bigwigs set to reimpose Iran sanctions, Egypt cracks down on influencers, & More
7: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend in Tianjin in what will be his first visit to China in seven years, a sign that tensions between the two massive countries are easing. Border disputes, technological rivalries, and China’s support for Pakistan have aggravated the relationship, but the US’s tariff policies appear to be pushing them closer.
30: The three most powerful European countries – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – have got the wheels moving on restoring sanctions on Iran that they had lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear deal. The action comes amid concerns that Tehran is expanding its nuclear arsenal again. The sanctions could retake effect within 30 days.
151: Egyptian authorities have been arresting TikTok influencers with millions of followers. One human rights organization has tracked 151 such people being charged in the past five years in connection with their TikTok videos – and the full number could be even higher. The arrests are part of a broader government effort to clamp down on speech they see as antithetical to the official definition of family values.
250: Seven US deportees arrived in Rwanda yesterday as a part of a deal the East African country has struck with the Trump administration to ultimately accept up to 250 deportees. It comes after Kigali made a similar deal with the United Kingdom in 2022.
3: Thailand’s Constitutional Court permanently removed Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, dissolving her cabinet and deepening political turmoil in the country. She is the third of her family to be ousted from office, amid continued dominance by Thailand’s royalist-military establishment – despite her party taking electoral power from them in 2023.
American President Donald Trump's X Page is seen displayed on a smartphone with a Tiktok logo in the background
Where we get our news - and why it changes everything
In August 1991, a handful of high-ranking Soviet officials launched a military coup to halt what they believed (correctly) was the steady disintegration of the Soviet Union. Their first step was to seize control of the flow of information across the USSR by ordering state television to begin broadcasting a Bolshoi Theatre production of Swan Lake on a continuous loop until further notice. (Click that link for some prehistoric GZERO coverage of that event.)
Even in the decade that followed the Cold War’s end, citizens of both authoritarian states and democracies had far fewer sources of reliable information than today about what was happening in their communities, across their countries and around the world.
Earlier this month, the Reuters Institute published its 14th annual Digital News Report, which Reuters claims is the “most comprehensive study of news consumption worldwide.” Its findings detail just how fundamentally different today’s media landscape has become. Here are some key takeaways that help us understand how and where people get their information and ideas about what’s happening today:
- “News use across online platforms continues to fragment.”
- “Engagement with traditional media sources such as TV, print, and news websites continues to fall, while dependence on social media, video platforms, and online aggregators grows. This is particularly the case in the United States.”
- “The proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States (54%) is sharply up – overtaking both TV news (50%) and news websites/apps (48%) for the first time.”
- “Around a third of our global sample use Facebook (36%) and YouTube (30%) for news each week. Instagram (19%) and WhatsApp (19%) are used by around a fifth, while TikTok (16%) remains ahead of X at 12%.”
- Personalities and influencers are, in some countries, playing a significant role in shaping public debates.
- There’s no reason to expect these trends won’t continue indefinitely.
There’s much more in the Reuters report, but today let’s focus on a few political implications of the points above.
In the years since social media and online influencers began shaping our perception of reality, we’ve seen strong anti-establishment political trends. Think Brexit, the election of charismatic political outsiders (like Donald Trump), and a move away from long-entrenched political establishments in dozens of countries.
Social media algorithms create “filter bubbles” as algorithms feed us steady supplies of what they’ve learned we like at the expense of new information and ideas that make us question what we believe. That trend helps explain the worsening polarization we see in the United States and many European countries.
That problem is compounded by the increasing prevalence in social media feeds of AI bots, which can generate heavy volumes of false information, distorting our sense of reality every day and in real time.
All these trends will make politics, particularly in democracies, much less predictable over time as elections swing outcomes between competing ideologies.
As a source of news and insight, social media has brought billions of people directly into the political lives of their countries in ways unimaginable a generation ago. They’ll continue to play a positive role in helping news consumers and voters learn more and share their views. But the unreliability of so many social media information sources — and the political volatility it increasingly generates — create problems that will only become more complex as technologies change.
And this problem is intensifying at a time when more of the big threats facing governments extend across borders — the eruption of more regional wars, climate change fallout, management of refugee flows, and governance of artificial intelligence. Big ideological swings following elections will make long-term multinational cooperation much more complicated.
Tell us what you think. How should our elected leaders, media sources, and all of us news consumers respond to these challenges? Let us know here.
A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration.
Hard Numbers: Could Microsoft buy TikTok?, Get me the Operator, Meta and ByteDance spend on AI, ElevenLabs’ billions, Ready for “Humanity’s Last Exam”?
2020: Microsoft is in talks to acquire TikTok, according to President Donald Trump. If that rings a bell it’s because Microsoft sought to buy the social media app in 2020, the last time Trump tried to ban the app. The deal fell through, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later called the attempted TikTok takeover the “strangest thing I've ever worked on.” This time around, all the company has said on the matter is that it “has nothing to share at this time.” Meanwhile, Trump has also nodded to there being “great interest in TikTok” from several companies.
200: OpenAI announced Operator, its AI “agent,” in an experimental “research preview,” on Thursday. The point is that this model can not only chat with you but can actually perform tasks for you, like booking a restaurant reservation or ordering food for delivery. It’s currently available to subscribers of ChatGPT Pro, a $200-a-month subscription.
65 billion: Meta said Friday it expects to spend up to $65 billion in 2025, up from $40 billion in 2024, to fuel its growing AI ambitions. Meanwhile, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance has reportedly earmarked $21 billion, including $12 billion on AI infrastructure.
3 billion: The AI voice-cloning company ElevenLabs has raised a new $250 million funding round announced Friday that values it at around $3 billion. We tried out ElevenLabs’ software last year to clone our author’s voice and translate it into different languages.
3,000: Researchers at the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI released “Humanity’s Last Exam” on Thursday, a 3,000-question multiple-choice and short-answer test designed to evaluate AI models’ capabilities. With AI models succeeding at most existing tests, the researchers strived to create one that will be able to stump most — or at least show when they’ve become truly superintelligent. For now, they’re struggling: All of the current top models fail the exam with OpenAI’s o1 model scoring the highest at 8.3%.Is the TikTok threat really about AI?
Four years after President Donald Trump’s initial unsuccessful attempt to ban TikTok on national security grounds, Congress succeeded in passing bipartisan legislation to force the app's removal, which former President Joe Biden signed into law. The ban, requiring mobile app stores, cloud hosts, and internet service providers to drop TikTok, was upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday despite challenges from TikTok, content creators, and free speech advocates who argued it violated the First Amendment.
Yet TikTok’s presence in America continues through an unusual turn of events. After briefly going offline in the US late Saturday, the app resumed service on Sunday ahead of President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, with the new president issuing an executive order late Monday to keep TikTok operational for another 75 days. This executive intervention, however bizarre since Trump initiated the effort to ban TikTok during his first term, also raises complex legal questions about presidential authority to override — or ignore — congressional legislation.
Throughout this political saga, a fundamental question remains: What exactly is TikTok’s threat to national security? Critics typically focus on two main concerns: China’s potential access to American user data and its ability to influence public opinion through the app’s content algorithm.
While TikTok stands as one of the world’s most sophisticated implementations of artificial intelligence in social media, its role in the broader US-China AI competition is nuanced. The platform’s AI capabilities, though powerful, operate largely parallel to rather than directly within the ongoing technological rivalry between the two nations, which is more focused on large language models, generative AI, and the advanced chips that power these systems.
“TikTok is AI, but not the kind that is fueling today’s global AI race,” explained Tinglong Dai, a professor at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “Its recommendation engine is more akin to reinforcement learning, the AI technique behind AlphaGo, the DeepMind system that mastered the board game Go by training against itself. Unlike generative AI models like ChatGPT, TikTok's AI isn’t about creating – it’s about optimizing engagement and influence.”
This distinction is important. While attention has focused on TikTok’s data collection practices, experts suggest the more significant concern lies elsewhere. After all, TikTok collects about as much data from users as any other social media app.
Kenton Thibaut, senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, said that data collection would become a bigger issue if the US were to enter formal conflict with China. “Should the US end up in a conflict with China, it is the device-level compromises that the app represents” — such as collecting real-time location data — “that, in my opinion, pose a much greater potential threat than the data-gathering or algorithmic manipulation concerns that are currently at the fore of the conversation surrounding the app,” she said.
But TikTok’s algorithm is more relevant to the AI race than the data it collects, according to Xiaomeng Lu, director of geo-technology at Eurasia Group. “That’s why China indicated that ByteDance can’t sell TikTok’s AI recommendation algorithm without government approval last time around, and is very likely still holding that view,” she said.
The potential value of this algorithm hasn’t gone unnoticed by the private sector. Perplexity AI’s recent bid to merge with TikTok’s US operations, reportedly valued at “well north of $50 billion,” suggests that TikTok’s recommendation system might be valuable for advancing the capabilities of an AI search engine like Perplexity.
However, Anton Dahbura, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, offers a more skeptical view: “I have no reason to doubt that TikTok’s algorithm is very good, but given the state of many software technologies today, it isn’t irreproducible,” he said. “However, controlling the flow of information on such a scale and for nefarious purposes by any company should be recognized as unethical, irresponsible, and hopefully someday, illegal.”
The real concern, according to Dai, extends beyond mere technology: “The bigger story isn’t TikTok’s data or even ByteDance's dominance — it’s Xi Jinping’s global ambitions. TikTok gives China an unprecedented ability to shape what Americans see, think, believe, and even dream.”
With TikTok poised to survive in the United States under President Trump’s conditional approval, pending a potential partial sale, the platform represents an unprecedented scenario in American media: Never before has such an influential platform, powered by sophisticated AI and used by millions of Americans, remained under the potential influence of an adversarial nation. But politics makes the strangest bedfellows: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew attended Trump’s inauguration on Monday, an assurance that Trump will rewrite the typical bounds of the US-China relationship, perhaps even softening his stance on China if he feels like it serves him well.TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, March 23, 2023 in Washington D.C.
Looks like the TikTok ban is coming. Probably. And with unintended consequences
Barring an eleventh-hour reprieve, TikTok’s operations in the US are likely to be shut down on Sunday. China is said to be considering a sale of its stateside outfit to X owner Elon Musk as the incoming administration seeks a pause on the ban so it can pursue a deal to keep it running. While both of those options look unlikely, at least in the short term, President-elect Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would delay enforcement of the ban for 60 to 90 days.
The Supreme Court hasn’t ruled on a challenge to the ban yet, nor is it required to by the Sunday deadline. The law, passed in April, only requires that US app stores no longer carry or permit updates of TikTok, and that internet service providers block access to the TikTok website. That would leave existing users with access to the platform, though it would degrade over time. But ByteDance, the social media platform’s owner, announced Wednesday that it is preparing to fully shut down the app in the US when the ban comes into effect.
Meanwhile, in a case of unintended consequences, TikTok users have been signing up en masse for China’s TikTok equivalent, RedNote — or Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book.” The shift is connecting US and Chinese social media users, which means that one of the aims of the TikTok ban, keeping US social media users away from China, may come up short of its goal. But it’s also exposing Chinese users to thousands of Western voices – something Beijing may not appreciate either.Los Angeles City firemen spray water to protect houses threatened by a brush fire in Griffith Park, Los Angeles May 8, 2007. The fire broke out in the hills above Los Angeles forcing evacuation of the city's largest park and zoo. Local media reported that authorities have arrested an arson suspect who was badly burned.
Hard Numbers: LA faces more fires, Meta makes big cuts, US inflation ticks up, Zaijian TikTok
6 million: Fire officials in Southern California said over 6 million people are still in danger from four major fires burning in the hills around Los Angeles, with hot, dry winds expected to worsen conditions over the weekend. Herculean efforts from fire crews have contained large sections of the Palisades and Eaton fires, but they are racing against time to save as many lives and houses as possible in America’s second-largest metropolis.
5: Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, says it will lay off 5% of staff this year, amounting to about 3,600 jobs. The announcement comes amid major policy changes at the social media giant, including the end of content moderation for the US and the replacement of its public policy chief with a prominent Republican.
2.9: US inflation rose from 2.7% in November to 2.9% in December, the third straight month of accelerating price hikes while rates remain well above their target levels. That said, underlying pressures of inflation appear to be easing, and analysts still believe the Federal Reserve will be able to proceed with planned interest rate cuts in 2025 – though how the Trump administration’s planned tariffs will skew plans is yet to be seen.
700,000: Have you paid your cat tax? You’ll need to share a cute pic of your favorite feline if you join the 700,000 TikTok users who have set up shop over at rival Chinese video streaming app Xiaohongshu, also known by its English name RedNote. (The literal translation, “Little Red Book” was also the nickname of the collection of Mao Zedong’s sayings that Red Guards used to justify atrocities during the Cultural Revolution). So far, the “refugees” have had a playful welcome, with Chinese netizens teaching the newcomers Mandarin and engaging in absurdist humor in exchange for coveted pet pics.