I hate to nitpick, but what's been described is not really 'pullign a Meiji' it's more 'pulling a Peter the Great'. The Meiji Restoration wasn't pulled off by a member of the imperial family, least of all by the Emperor himself. It was caused by a group of samurai from satsuma and from Yokohama banding together to get rid of the inner clique around the Emperor and the Shogun. They then transferred power to themselves and cut the Emperor out altogether.
This can't really happen in China as the Empire has no equivalent of the samurai class; perhaps some sort of military coup, but the thing is that the Eurpean powers have already opened China through the Opium Wars and the Unequal Treaties, whereas Japan was only just emerging on the European market when it pulled itself together.
If we lok at any sort of Chinese resurgence, we se that the Europeans fairly quickly quashed it. The Boxer Rebelion can be seen like this; it wasn't the very conservative, almost primitive beliefs of the rebels that scared the Europeans, it was their nationalism and their hatred of the West. Any nationalist, Imperialist 'restoration' would require a confrontation with the European powers which would probably meet with failure.
Unless, that is, it was a Eurpean backed venture. Perhaps after the Boxer Rebellion the Germans or the French decide that they want to dominate China as their exclusive sphere of influence. They get some fairly liberal, Euro-friendly family member no the throne and then modernise his administration with lots of 'advisors'. Once this has happened for about 10 or so years, there might be a military coup to remove the European backers. The Europeans want to fight back but the other colonial powers, keen to preserve the status quo stop them from intervening and China becomes more independent, although I doubt they'd be getting Hong Kong back for awhile.