HONG KONG — In a wood-paneled boardroom in Shanghai, Everett Chu pauses from his job overseeing the finances of snack food giant Want Want China Holdings Ltd. to marvel at the fickleness of history.

Sixty years ago, Chu's father, an officer in Chiang Kai-shek's army, was on the losing Nationalist side in China's civil war. When Chiang escaped to the island stronghold of Taiwan, the elder Chu was among the troops trapped on the mainland by Mao Zedong's victorious Communists.

Chu and 10,000 other survivors crossed into the Golden Triangle, the opium-growing region of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. Many became kingpins in the heroin trade. "Had my dad stayed, I would have become a drug dealer," his son says.

Instead, the senior Chu chose evacuation to Taiwan and made it the family home. Today, his son is Want Want's chief financial officer and is living and working in the land his father fled. Want Want, which is controlled by Taiwanese billionaire Tsai Eng-meng, has grown into the world's largest maker of rice crackers by running 34 factories and generating more than 90 percent of its $1.53 billion in sales last year in mainland China.

"We share the same culture and language and ancestors," Chu, 44, says. "As long as the political situation remains very friendly, we have a unique opportunity to become the No. 1 food and beverage company in the world."

Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan's new president, is pressing to make ties even closer. He's easing investment and travel barriers that have impeded Want Want and 100,000 other Taiwanese companies that do business on the mainland, angering opponents who say he's playing into the hands of Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Since 1988, when Taiwan lifted a ban on its citizens' visiting China, Taiwanese enterprises have invested as much as $200 billion in their giant neighbor.

Ma's predecessors enforced restrictions to slow the loss of capital, jobs and technology. Since Ma took office in May 2008, he has relaxed those rules by re-establishing direct air, sea and postal links severed in 1949.

Beijing eased its ban on Taiwan-based tourism, and the two sides are now freer to invest in each other's banking, insurance and securities industries.

For Ma reaching across the Taiwan Strait is a high- risk, high- reward strategy.

He hopes that hitching Taiwan's economic fortunes to the world's fastest-growing major economy can lift his nation out of recession. Taiwan is battling its worst economic slump on record.

Gross domestic product contracted by 10.1 percent in the first quarter, the poorest performance since record keeping began in 1952. The second quarter was marginally better with a 7.54 percent decline. Unemployment was a record 6.07 percent in August. Exports, which account for 70 percent of GDP, may tumble 21 percent this year, the statistics bureau forecasts.

To make things worse, a typhoon killed more than 600 people in August and caused $3.3 billion in damage, leaving Ma's administration fighting charges it had bungled disaster prevention and relief operations.

Ma's critics say China's leaders may use economic integration to ultimately bring the island they regard as a Chinese province under Beijing's control.

Investors so far have endorsed the cross-strait thaw. Taiwan's Taiex index jumped 62 percent this year through Sept. 29 after a 46 percent plunge in 2008. That's better than the 46 percent rise in the benchmark Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong, the biggest Chinese market for foreign capital.

This year, overseas investors pumped an additional $11 billion into Taiwanese stocks as of Sept. 29 compared with a net outflow of $14.4 billion in 2008, according to data from the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Chu and Tsai took advantage of one of Ma's relaxed rules in April. Want Want, whose Chinese characters signify prosperity, became the first company to sell shares in Taipei after the Taiwan exchange lifted a ban on capital raising by companies whose investment in mainland China exceeds 40 percent of their net worth.

Want Want shares promptly surged 39 percent from April 27 to Sept. 29, more than double their 17 percent rise in Hong Kong.

Now Ma must rekindle the growth that propelled Taiwan to become one of Asia's first tiger economies. As he encourages Want Want's Chu and like-minded entrepreneurs to embrace a land where their fathers fought and lost, he's gambling that Taiwan can forge economic ties with China without falling into that country's political clutches.