Did Western Imperialism drive China to Communism?

Yes, this is true. For at least a millennium before the nineteenth century, China had considered itself the premier power in Asia, a premiere world culture, and an international center of culture and power. Other countries, such as Japan, bowed down to and paid tribute to China. It was a nation filled with pride in its history and achievements.
However, by the late eighteenth century, the country was beginning to weaken. At the same time, European nations were eager for the goods it had to offer, such as tea, porcelain, and silk. They were running a heavy trade imbalance, because they had little China wanted in return. Therefore, the Europeans looked for a product that the Chinese desired and found it in opium. When the Chinese government grew alarmed at levels of opium addiction in their population and tried to ban the foreign opium trade, the Opium Wars broke out. When the West won them, it imposed humiliating conditions on the Chinese. The European nations essentially divided the country up amongst themselves. By 1900, Chinese pride had been broken, and the Chinese felt inferior and abject.
The Chinese abolished their monarchy and tried, in the early years of the century, to run as a Western style republic. However, weak governance, corruption, and the intense humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, which gave former German territories in China to the Japanese, alienated many Chinese from traditional Western forms of governance. In 1921, the Chinese Communist Party formed. By the 1940s, the Chinese were fed up with Western powers meddling in their governments and with governing coalitions that seemed more attuned to what the West wanted than the dire needs of their own people. By this time, many Chinese were willing to turn their backs on the Western imperialists, who seemed to have brought nothing but suffering and humiliation to their nation, and followed Mao into setting up a communist state.