Well the Brits actually waged war on China because the Chinese wanted to stop the importation of opium that was leading to widespread addiction and basically ruining the nation. Most of the opium was being produced in India and shipped through Hong Kong, another British colony, into China. Strangely enough the Opium Wars were not in our history books when I was a boy in the UK. It was called the Boxer Rebellion and sold to us as a nasty short-sighted Chinese attempt to block "free trade". Naturally enough we were not told exactly WHAT what our country wanted to import into China.