Play The Diplomat’s Quiz: October 18, 2015 Edition

Sunday, October 18, marked “Adoption Day” for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or the Iran Deal) between Iran and the group of powers known as the P5+1, comprising the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China. Per the Iran deal, “Adoption Day” is the date “90 days after the endorsement of this JCPOA by the UN Security Council” (otherwise known as “Finalization Day”). The Security Council adopted a resolution on the deal on July 20, 2015. On adoption day, the JCPOA comes into effect. Basically, starting Sunday, the terms of the Iran deal are binding on its participants and the deal moves from paper to reality.

It’s official: Taiwan’s ruling party, the KMT or Nationalist Party, has changed its presidential candidate — just three months before the election. Now Eric Chu, the party chairman as well as mayor of New Taipei City, will run instead of Hung Hsiu-chu.

Hung has been faring badly in election polls, which consistently show her trailing opposition Democratic Progressive Party candidate Tsai Ing-wen by double-digits – over 30 percentage points, according to the latest poll from Taiwan Indicators Survey Research. That led to increasing speculation that the KMT – worried not only about losing the presidency, but about Hung’s lagging numbers torpedoing the chances of its legislative candidates – would pull Hung in favor of Chu, who is believed to be a more competitive candidate.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye met with U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday, marking her second official visit to the United States during her tenure as president. Park’s visit was originally scheduled for mid-June 2015 but was postponed due to South Korea’s public health crisis stemming from the the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus. Park arrived in the United States on Tuesday for a four-day visit with an extensive agenda covering bilateral defense, economic, and political cooperation with the United States, South Korea’s most important ally.

On Friday, following Park’s meetings with Obama, the two leaders released two joint statement: “The United States-Republic of Korea Alliance: Shared Values, New Frontiers,” a general statement on the state of the U.S.-South Korea alliance and its future, and “United States-Republic of Korea Joint Statement on North Korea,” a more specific statement on how the alliance will handle denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and North Korean provocations.

Bernie Sanders, the self-styled social democratic governor of Vermont, has been gaining on Clinton in most polls. Although most mainstream media agree that Clinton won yesterday’s first Democratic Party debate, Sanders appears to have won the social media battle, with one poll showing that 69 percent of all tweets mentioning him by name were positive. For Clinton, the number was 53 percent.

To be eligible to participate in the November 8 election, prospective voters’ information included on the official voter list must be accurate. The initial public release of the list on May 25 (allowing changes to be made until June 7) by the UEC – the constitutionally-created institution that oversees all aspects and conduct of the election – also drew criticism due to extensive errors. The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), alleged that 80 percent of the names on the list were incorrectly entered or omitted, a claim the UEC admitted could be true in individual townships, but not true across the nation. From September 14 to September 27, the voter list opened once again for public viewing and correction. Again, voters encountered errors in personal information and name omissions, some suggesting even more so than during the first round.

George Osborne will be grinning ear to ear when Chinese President Xi Jinping leaves London on October 23, after a four-day state visit. China has chosen London as the first international financial hub to issue renminbi-denominated Chinese sovereign debt.According to the Financial Times, Chinese President Xi Jinping, on his trip to London next week, will announce that Chinese Treasury bonds will be issued in London. Osborne, the British chancellor of the exchequer (treasury chief), has sought to turn London into the primary western hub for financial interactions within Chinese markets.

Back in 2013, under his oversight, China and the United Kingdom unveiled a landmark agreement that would allow U.K.-based financial institution to directly invest in Chinese equity and debt markets. Next week’s announcement on sovereign debt will further cement London’s place as perhaps the most China-friendly financial hub in the West and help China popularize the use of its currency outside of its borders.

Kyrgyzstan’s Central Election Commission released the final results of the parliamentary elections held on October 4. The final results closely mirror the preliminary results with the Social Democratic Party (SDPK) coming out on top, capturing 27.56 percent of the votes and receiving 38 seats in the 120-member parliament.

Respublika-Ata-Jurt–formed by the merging of Respublika and Ata-Jurt, which had both held seats in the previous parliament–pulled 20.26 percent of the national vote and will received 28 seats. Kyrgyzstan–a new party with an unimaginative, but recognizable, name–won 13.07 percent of the votes and will seat 18 deputies. Onuguu-Progress, Bir Bol, and Ata-Meken recieved 9.39, 8.59, and 7.08 percent of the vote respectively and will seat 13,12, and 11 members in the new parliament.

Parties needed to poll nationally above 7 percent, as well receive at least 0.7 percent of the votes in each of Kyrgyzstan’s 7 regions, plus its two largest cities–Bishkek and Osh. Ata-Meken, which held 18 seats in the previous parliament just barely made the threshold.

Notably, the issue of a possible deployment of a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system to counter North Korean ballistic missiles did not make an appearance in the joint statement. China has been particularly sensitive to the possible deployment of THAAD systems on the Korean peninsula. In March, Chinese and South Korean diplomatic representatives exchanged sharp words over the issue.

In a surprising move, the most recent U.S. News & World Report ranking put China’s Tsinghua University ahead of the United States’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the world’s best engineering school. Together with the news that Chinese scientist Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in medicine, Tsinghua University’s ranking has led people to debate the rise of China’s educational system and its soft power.

Maybe one should be not surprised by Tsinghua’s success at all. It is not just Tsinghua that is moving upwards: several Chinese universities have surpassed traditional elite universities in Europe and Asia. Indeed, as the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Global Universities Rankings show, among the top 750 universities around the world, China has 65. Moreover, Chinese universities occupy five positions among the top 10 Asian universities ranked by the report. Chinese universities are expected to enter the global top 10 list in coming decades. As one Australian education expert explains, “When more Chinese journals are indexed by Thomson Reuters and when four million Chinese researchers start to cite one another, then we can expect Chinese universities to rapidly improve their position on various rankings.”

The U.S. Navy is reportedly preparing to conduct “freedom of navigation” (FON) operations, sending one or more surface ships within 12 nautical miles (nm) of Chinese-claimed features in the South China Sea. The administration has been pressured to go ahead with this demonstration of U.S. views on conduct at sea, but the terms of the public debate have failed to match the legal and political implications.