Commentary: How China manages Singapore-based Manus’ sale will reveal its AI ‘red line’

NOT JUST ANOTHER APP DEAL

Manus lands in an awkward place. It is a consumer app from a firm already re-domiciled to Singapore. On paper, there is limited scope for a narrow national security case against the sale.

Yet the commerce ministry is both the gatekeeper for trade and export controls and China’s main representative in trade talks with the United States. It has little desire to be seen as jeopardising the fragile trade truce agreed in October 2025, just as Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump are preparing to meet repeatedly in 2026 to keep that understanding on track.

At the same time, it is unlikely to simply stand aside while a Chinese-founded AI company of global interest is folded into a US tech giant.

The commerce ministry cannot veto the sale to Meta outright. It would be hard to defend on technical grounds and risk embarrassing the US Treasury.

But doing nothing is also untenable. Other tech companies might get the idea that clever corporate structuring is enough to escape Beijing’s reach.

A formal review sits uneasily in the middle, but it does three things the commerce ministry needs: It asserts its regulatory presence, avoids an immediate clash over the truce, and passes the hardest choices up to the top leadership.

THE ECOSYSTEM THAT PRODUCED TIKTOK

Manus is unlikely to be viewed as a narrow trade case by top leaders. Instead, it will bring into focus how China’s tech economy actually operates.

Despite a growing role in open-source foundation models, China’s comparative strengths still arguably lie at the application layer.

TikTok is the clearest illustration: a product first stress-tested on China’s vast home market and then turned into one of the world’s most successful consumer apps. The ecosystem that made that possible – engineers, product managers and operators who can ship, iterate and scale quickly – can still be seen as one of China’s core assets.

The long-running wrangle over TikTok’s forced divestment in the US, which has now produced a majority American-owned joint venture while the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance retains only a 19.9 per cent stake, shows how an application-layer success can become a bargaining chip in negotiations with Washington.