The September 20 deadline for a purported Tiktok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok's bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ownership of the app, confusing investors and users. Meanwhile, Beijing's discontent with the TikTok sale is increasingly obvious. From a report: China has no reason to approve the "dirty" and "unfair" deal that allows Oracle and Walmart to effectively take over TikTok based on "bullying and extortion," slammed an editorial published Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The editorial argued that TikTok's success -- a projected revenue of about a billion dollars by the end of 2020 -- "has apparently made Washington feel uneasy" and prompted the U.S. to use "national security as the pretext to ban the short video sharing app." The official message might stir mixed feelings within ByteDance, which has along the way tried to prove its disassociation from the Chinese authority, a precondition for the companies' products to operate freely in Western countries.

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