I might be an outlier but I don't think the Opium Wars or even the genocidal disaster of the Taiping War is what stopped China achieving its great power status earlier.To me, it was always the corruption of the late Empire and the conservatism that is always hard to get past. But it could have been done, and maybe the war with France could have been avoided too
I'd like to elaborate on this. I am also of the view that the British (on their own at least) didn't deal the killing blow to the idea of China as a global power in the 19th century, rather I think the internal problems of the Chinese state (which can be seen as far back as the early dynastic period) were a far greater inhibiting factor. Firstly, China is a large country and large countries are hard to govern by their very nature. This obviously wasn't enough on its own, but it's worth mentioning that China is the only large country (the next largest is Algeria) that uses a unitary model of government (this also applies to Qing-era China), which highlights the difficulty that the central government has with the independent/rebellious populations on the fringes of their territory. The large size of China coupled with its massive and diverse (read: potentially rebellious and hard to control) population meant that China, throughout almost all of its history, was chiefly focused on internal problems, and great powers (by definition) are those that are able to focus more intensely on foreign affairs. Furthermore, I don't think Japan and China are analogous in this situation. Even setting aside European intervention, Japan was a much more culturally cohesive (read: ethnically and linguistically homogenous). This meant that the most critical factors for hastening industrialization (education and low barriers to communication) were easy to overcome, whereas China has a much less developed internal road system (except along the coast) and many more language groups, making it more difficult to mobilize the entire population towards industrializing.
That got a little long-winded so,
TLDR: China was too big and unwieldy with too many internal problems to industrialize effectively and rapidly like Japan did in the 19th century, even setting aside the intervention of Europeans.