“Liberation” implies freeing someone(s) from a pre existing entity. So no matter what you think of the CCP today, the opium wars had nothing to do with liberation, it was just outright conquest. The CCP didn’t event exist until 1921, almost 75 years later.

If anything, a direct line can be drawn from the carving up of China by European, and later Japanese powers, to the fall of the Qing, the Chinese civil war, and the rise of the CCP.

What’s “strange” is interpreting dynastic greed and colonization as a good thing in 2021.