The Americans rivaled the British in the tea trade, but Americans don't like tea. Also, they don't have opium, so inferior tobacco must be used
The Americans liked tea just fine for a long while. And there are quite a few Americans who like tea quite a lot; haven't you ever heard of iced tea?
Historically, the United States was in fact one of China's major trading partners from even before we got firm control of ports on the West Coast, a period termed the "Old China Trade". Due to the various political traditions of the United States during the 19th century and our military weakness, however, we opted not to take control of specific ports, but instead favored an "open" system. It is likely that a different formation could lead to taking a treaty port like Hong Kong or Qingdao.
EDIT: Sorry, I had to go to dinner and needed to be brief. Let me expand a bit; clearly, at its formation the OTL United States had something of a bent against Empire in the European sense, at least outside of North America (inside, everyone was fair game), and a considerable investment and interest in trade. This informed imperialistic efforts by the United States, in that it took a somewhat more indirect route than was common to what we think of as Western colonization, in that it was focused less on controlling territory and more on influencing governments to have open trade and favor American commerce (as it still is, in fact). Very much and perhaps unsurprisingly like British efforts in the Persian Gulf (eg., the UAE), in Southeast Asia (eg., Brunei), and in India itself (in the form of the princely states), the United States preferred friendly local governments to direct control. This may perhaps have also been influenced that most areas of American interest were governed by states that could be influenced and controlled indirectly, rather than needing an Army presence; where interest and statelessness coincided, as in the Pacific or much of North America, again it reverted towards a more typical governing role.
As for the case of China specifically, colonies in the African or Southeast Asian sense are unlikely for any power. The territory and population that would need to be controlled were immense, and essentially all the benefits of colonization (open markets and so on) could be acquired by instead coopting the Qing government, which in fact was exactly what was done. It was far cheaper and easier to rely on Chinese agents to keep order than to try to colonize China themselves. In fact, in most colonies the colonizers coopted local governing structures of this type, it was just that they were vastly weaker relative to Western militaries than even the late Qing military was, so this influence became direct control relatively quickly. The most likely path for any such colonization to take is the way it went in India, where colonizing powers gradually supplanted central authority for a variety of reasons, until they ended up ruling the place anyways. This was more or less what was happening in China with divisions into spheres of influence and so on, except that the spread of Western ideas into China, the overthrow of the Qing, and World War I all ended up slowing down the process, and the Japanese invasion and World War II pretty much killed it.