The mainland company Unigroup's investment in Taiwan's semiconductor industry is purely commercial and should not be politicized, a mainland official said Wednesday.
Unigroup, controlled by the prestigious Tsinghua University, is buying stakes in three Taiwanese chip giants with a total price of 17.3 billion yuan (about 2.7 bln U.S. dollars), in an effort to ascend to top chip-maker status.
However, the purchase has met rejection on the island as some politicians claim it is a "threat to Taiwan industry" and "mainland conspiracy."
At a press conference, the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang called for objective and sensible views on mutual investment, adding the voluntary cooperation between companies of the two sides is mutually beneficial and will help the island's economy.
It has proven that in the past 20 years, the two sides have complementary advantages through cooperation. "It's not one side eating the other, nor is it one side buying or controlling the other," said Ma.
The cooperation has brought Taiwan a huge trade surplus, and the mainland has been the most important economic hinterland for maintaining Taiwan's GDP growth and its industrial upgrades.
"The cross-Strait cooperation trend is inevitable, and can not be converted by human will," he said.
While Taiwan put restrictions on mainland investment, the mainland has further opened its market to the island.
The spokesman said the mainland welcomes the plan by Taiwan-based TSMC, a world leading semiconductor foundry and producer of Iphone CPUs, to build factories on the mainland, enabling Taiwan companies to share development opportunities.
Ma also announced eased restrictions for Taiwanese to do business on the mainland, expanding another 24 sectors such as advertising, packaging and clothing to individual Taiwanese entrepreneurs.
The mainland approved 2,288 projects with Taiwanese investment in the first 10 months of 2015, a year-on-year increase of 20.9 percent, the Ministry of Commerce announced last week.
