Annotated Guide to Julian's Academic Papers at UCI since 2012

There are probably too many papers on the UCI academic page for a casual visitor to make sense of anything, so here's an explanation...

Most of these are from classes, whose departments, names, and titles should be in parentheses ( ) after the title of the paper. Some of them were written in attempts, all failed except for one, to fulfill the Ph.D. program requirements to submit three "qualifying papers" before taking the oral examination to advance to candidacy (after which a dissertation prospectus would be presented to a committee, followed by the actual dissertation and defense, ultimately the elusive degree). A qualifying paper had to be signed by two professors and submitted to the department, usually after one or more revisions. See the blog for an entry on how all this added up to losing "good standing" in the program, basically the same as flunking out.

A few of these papers were presented at academic conferences at UCI, USC, and UCLA. One, the only successful qualifying paper, was accepted for a presentation on an Asian Politics panel at the 2015 Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference in Chicago (a big deal in the field), but by the time of registration, good standing in the program (and thereby travel reimbursement) was in jeopardy. The submission was summarily withdrawn. None have been published or submitted to academic journals because they are, as became painfully clear during the process of trying to get approval of qualifying papers, not up to standard.

Older papers are near the bottom, and newer ones are near the top. Those from classes are all either from the Political Science Dept. or the History Dept.

I was most intellectually invested in the papers on Chinese democracy, which were intended to culminate in qualifying paper #1. After seven different versions read by no fewer than four professors, however, no single version was received well enough to be signed, resulting in a year on leave of absence from the program from Fall 2013 to Spring 2014. The earliest one posted here came from an independent study suggested by my advisor, who may only have wanted a comparison of democratization in the PRC, Singapore, and Taiwan. The one from UCI's CSD graduate student conference of spring 2013 was criticized for misuse of the term "hypothesis" and general disarray while attempting to account for ontological and epistemological disagreement. The last version was my attempt to provide evidence of a democratic progress in the PRC, and I think it would've benefitted from one further revision to cite the late Tianjian Shi's last book. Of all attempts, the most readable one was probably written for a history class. Basically, don't get me started on my thoughts on Chinese democracy; I'll talk your ears off and probably not be able to communicate clearly.

For the academic year 2014-2015, I wrote several versions of a paper on Chinese drones, intended to be qualifying paper #2. I think the last version of the drone paper is about as close as I ever came to conforming to the format of a standard academic journal article. I'd consider submitting it to a conference or journal, but this topic loses currency quickly for being frequently in the news. I myself prefer to read the earlier version, not least because it includes an excised section on privacy and domestic surveillance.

Having been unable to find professors to read the paper on Chinese sovereignty and border regions which I presented at USC's Korean Studies Institute Graduate Student Conference in Jan. 2015, I tried to make qualifying paper #3 something that would be useful even if I didn't continue in the program. The results were rather derivative literature reviews on rising China, first for a class very briefly and then extended to a full length paper (which was nonetheless declared to be only about a third of what would be necessary to do the topic academic justice or be signed).

Meta-paper page ends.