linguistic:paraphrasing
Legacy

Beyond staggering human and economic devastation, the Taiping Rebellion left changes within the late Qing dynasty. Power was, to a limited extent, decentralized, and ethnic Han Chinese officials were more widely employed in high positions than they had previously been. The traditional Manchu banner forces upon which the Qing dynasty depended failed and were gradually replaced with gentry-organized local armies. Franz H. Michael, wrote that these evolved into armies used by local warlords who dominated China after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Diana Lary, however, in a review-of-the-field article, cited studies that were skeptical of these claims, since the armies created to put down the Taiping operated in a different context from later regional armies.

The Taiping example of insurgent organization and its mix of Christianity and radical social equality influenced Sun Yat-sen and other future revolutionaries. Some Taiping veterans joined the Revive China Society, whose Christian members organized short-lived Heavenly Kingdom of the Great Mingshun in 1903. Although Karl Marx wrote several articles about the Taipings, he did not perceive a social program or agenda for change, only violence and destruction. Chinese Communist historians, following the lead of Mao Zedong, however, characterized the rebellion as a proto-communist uprising. Both Communist and Nationalist commanders studied Taiping organization and strategy during the Chinese Civil War. American General Joseph Stilwell, who commanded Chinese troops during the Second Sino-Japanese War, praised Zeng Guofan's campaigns for combining "caution with daring" and "initiative with perseverance."

Famine, disease, massacres, and social disruption led to a sharp decline in population, especially in the Yangtze delta. The result was a shortage in labor supply for the first time in centuries, making labor relatively more valuable than land. The Xiang Army used scorched earth tactics, refusing to take prisoners; Anhui, Southern Jiangsu, Northern Zhejiang and Northern Jiangxi were severely depopulated and had to be repopulated with migrants from Henan. The landed gentry of the Lower Yangtze region were reduced in numbers and concentration of land ownership was reduced.

The defeat of the Taiping Rebellion by military forces from Hunan led to the dramatic increase of Hunanese representation in the government, who played a role in reform efforts. By 1865, five of the eight viceroys were Hunanese. The Hunanese gentry, based on their experience with the Taiping, were more guarded against the influence of Westerners than other provinces.

Merchants in Shanxi and the Huizhou region of Anhui became less prominent because the rebellion disrupted trade in much of the country. However, trade in coastal regions, especially in Guangzhou and Ningbo was less affected by violence than trade in inland areas was. Streams of refugees who entered Shanghai contributed to the economic development of the city, which was previously less commercially relevant than other cities in the area were. Only a tenth of Taiping-published records survive to this day because they were mostly destroyed by the Qing in an attempt to rewrite the history of the conflict.

Historian John King Fairbank compares the Taiping rebels with the communists under Mao Zedong who came to power a century later:

In addition to the zeal, vigor, and puritanical discipline so often found in new political movements, they shared certain traditional Chinese interests, such as propagating and maintaining doctrinal orthodoxy, recruiting an elite of talent, realizing a utopian social order, and developing military power based on farmer-soldiers. Furthermore, both made use of foreign ideologies which required translation into Chinese with inevitable modifications in the process.