Academics assessing the nation’s democratic performance during the first half of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) term yesterday urged the public “to provoke disputes” to revive the system of checks and balances that they said has been noticeably weakened under Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) rule.

“The nation’s democracy has been in peril these past two years and I have been wondering on ways to resolve it, and my conclusion is that intellectuals must use [their] knowledge to provoke [public] disputes,” said Liu Chin-hsing (劉進興), professor of chemistry at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology.