Several hundred researchers at the Academia Sinica shouted appeals first made by the Sunflower movement at President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday when he visited the nation’s most eminent national research institution for an international conference about the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) issue.

While Ma was giving the keynote speech at the conference, Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深) and Shiu Wen-tang (許文堂), associate research fellows at the college’s Institute of Modern History, and Paul Jobin, an associate professor at the University of Paris Diderot, silently held aloft posters with messages for the president.