"The floatation is just the first step of our strategy to further tap into the shipbuilding market of Taiwan," said Ren Yuanlin, Chairman of the Board of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding.

"This is definitely a milestone for Taiwan," said Stanley Chu, a spokesman at the Taiwan Stock Exchange. "We see this listing as a strong future indicator and hope to attract more mainland companies."

"Our next step is to get red chips to list in Taiwan. Hopefully that will happen by the end of the year," he said. Red chips are Chinese companies incorporated overseas and traded in Hong Kong.

Eyeing Japan

China bought 583.1 billion yen ($6.97 billion) worth of Japanese government bonds in July, the seventh straight month of net buying, said the Ministry of Finance of Japan on September 8. The figure was higher than the net 456.4 billion yen ($5.3 billion) China purchased in June.

The news comes after the yen marked a fresh 15-year high against the dollar on September 7. The Chinese purchase was believed to be one of the factors pushing up the Japanese currency.

Since earlier this year, China has been diversifying its investments of foreign exchange reserves. The country has trimmed its holdings of the U.S. Treasury securities by $51.1 billion in the first half of this year while it loaded up $20.2 billion of the Japanese government bonds and $3.4 billion of South Korean treasury securities.

It is necessary now for the country to fend off risks of investing in U.S. dollar assets since the U.S. deficit has been piling up, said Guo Tianyong, Director of the Research Center of China's Banking Industry under the Central University of Finance.

China's foreign exchange reserves currently consist of 65 percent in the U.S. dollar-denominated assets, 26 percent in the euro, and 5 percent in the pound sterling, an anonymous government official was quoted by the China Securities Journal as saying.

M&A Push

By delivering a boost to mergers and acquisitions (M&As), China aims to sharpen its industrial competitiveness.

The State Council released a circular on September 6, vowing stiff efforts to press ahead with M&As in industries that are struggling with overcapacity, low concentration and weak innovation.

The focus would be put on automobiles, steel, cement, machinery, rare earths and aluminum sectors, said the State Council. The goal is to cultivate a batch of innovative corporate giants with international competitiveness.

The government also pledged to scrape policies that used to restrict cross-regional M&As, and allow private capital into state-controlled sectors through M&As.

China's domestic M&A activity has rebounded strongly, reaching levels comparable to those seen at the peak before the financial crisis, said a recent report by the international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

In the first half of 2010, there were 1,884 announced deals, with the largest being China Mobile's acquisition of a 20-percent stake in Shanghai Pudong Development Bank for $5.8 billion, said the report.