Because they didn’t use trade to facilitate imperialism, they used military force to establish a relationship of brutal imperial domination which they then leveraged into extortionate trade “deals”. The imperialist war happens first, then comes the imperialist “trade” built on top of it. Trade cannot be imperialist without the threat of military force, and imperialism is never, ever seperate from that. By the same token, trade without coercion cannot be imperialist. The mafia doesn’t use their perfectly legitimate businesses to start doing crimes, the crimes are what got them the perfectly legitimate businesses. Furthermore, somebody else actually running a legitimate business does not then make that person a mobster

“Trade” is such a vague term that says nothing about the situation the exchange is taking place in, when “looting, mass murder, trafficking and extortion” are all better descriptors for the kind of “trade” the Dutch and other Europeans visited on the world, which bears no resemblance to China’s way of dealing with other countries.