Atleast the Qing handed Russia a humiliating defeat in Xinjiang. Thank you Russia for the creation of the whole East Turkestan bullshit.
Thank you Britian for inventing Tibetan "Independence"
And most importantly thank you Japan for Inner Mongolia and Dongbei separatism
You can tell I am being sarcastic.
General Zuo is not a national hero for nothing, he went out to campaign carrying his coffin at the age of 60+. Without him Xinjiang wouldn't be part of China today. Li HongZhang wanted to give up Xinjiang completely.
If Qing didn't allow Han migration into Dongbei at the last minute, it would also have been lost to Russia.
Qing was only willing to truly modernize the military after the disastrous defeat against Japan, and that's not enough at all. The caste system of Qing under the 8 banners system was completely broken. To modernize the country you had to overthrow that system.
In a way, Qing was not even a government of China at the time, they were mostly financed by revenue from the customs at HK from Europeans towards the end. They can almost be seen as the middle man of the Europeans colonizers.