North America, and Chile in South America.
As the official policy of the government of the PRC from its inception was to trade with all countries, whether or not diplomatic relations had been established, business entities from most countries, other than the United States, developed trading arrangements with China in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1950s, Chinese foreign trade was heavily oriented toward the Soviet Union. By 1959, 48 percent of China's foreign trade was with the Soviets. Political disagreements between the two countries, caused Soviet trade to drop to only 7.5 percent of China's total foreign trade by 1966.
With the decline in the significance of the China-Soviet trade, there was a dramatic rise in the significance of China- Japan trade. By the end of the 1970s, Japan was China's leading trade partner; a position it has maintained. By 1988, the PRC's leading trading partners were Japan, Hong Kong, and the United States, in that order. Japan is an important trading partner with respect to both imports and exports, while Hong Kong is more important to China as an outlet for its exports, and the United States is more important as a source of imported products, particularly technology. The popular uprising in Beijing in 1989 and the PRC government's crushing of that uprising before the television cameras of the world led the Chinese government to temporarily suspend some of its economic readjustments, and to generally slow down the pace of economic reform in the country. For the most part, however, the PRC government wanted to continue its economic interaction with other countries, and, as the events of the summer of 1989 were pushed out of the public mind outside China by the Gulf War of 1991, economic recession, and American and British general elections, the trading climate between the PRC and other countries returned generally to pre-Tienamen conditions. By the f...