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I'm really curious - what people did you get this idea from? I've never heard this before. I have heard "mainland China" to mean, specifically, "China, not Hong Kong or Macau", from:
- Taiwanese people
- Hong Kong people
- Mainland Chinese people
- Taiwanese-americans
- Chinese-americans (immigrated from the mainland)
It's just mainland China (大陆）. I have never met Chinese or Taiwanese people who feel this is a politically loaded term.
For better or for worse, many people on both sides of the strait have used language along these lines that suggests that Taiwan is part of China for decades and probably even since a bit before 1949 (I was not alive at the time). I think that, at this point, the term “mainland China” is just the default.
That being said, a person from China could just say they’re from China and no one would be confused. This is in contrast to someone saying they’re Chinese, which can be ambiguous.
It's been my experience that westerners (I am a westerner) do have different assumptions about "mainland" Chinese people than people from Hong Kong who are assumed to be more cosmopolitan, "westernized", or even "politically neutral" from a western liberal capitalist perspective, so it seems reasonable to point it out in this context.