'IF THERE IS a war, it will not affect me since my businesses are all in Beijing. The war zone will be in the coastal area,' says Wang Yun-chiao, who runs three restaurants in the capital.
Like many Taiwanese businessmen on the mainland, he is strongly against any move towards independence, as is Ren Sheng, who has invested 700 million yuan (about HK$655.9 million) in retail, food processing and packaging in Henan province.
Mr Wang is the son of a mainlander who went to Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1949. He is a natural opponent of independence.
Yang Da-cheng is a native Taiwanese who moved to Shanghai 10 years to go into the property business, became chairman of the Taiwan Business Association in Shanghai and has lived through many cross-strait crises.
'There is no possibility of war. The environments in China and Taiwan are not the same. Taiwan is a place where people voice different opinions. Politicians there say different things in different places, which can easily attract all kinds of speculation,' Mr Yang said.
So he has slept comfortably over the last few weeks since Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian told a pro-independence group in Tokyo that he supported a referendum on independence, provoking a furious response from Beijing, including the threat of war and a large-scale practice in Shanghai against a Taiwan air raid.
