The importance of the Tai-ping Rebellion

Too bloody. Thats all its significance. Third Namking, had something like 65,000 killed for each day of its battles.

I have recently come to realize that the Taiping Rebellion is one of the most underrated events in world history (at least in the West). Coming at a time when China had some serious economic difficulties, the Tai-ping war caused so much death, destruction and economic disruption, that I consider it largely responsible for the weakness of China for the next 100 years. If not for the Tai-ping war (and the other associate rebellions), then China would have profited a lot more from the most developed regions in the Yangtze valley, and might have had a much better path in modernizing its economy. As it was, the Tai-ping war contributed a lot to the reticence of the Chinese elite to modernize the country, by creating the impresson that a return to traditional values was needed. What's more, the reconstruction after the war focused on the agriculture, creating the stereotype of the rural China. To get money for the reconstruction of the agriculture, the imperial government taxed industry and commerce most heavily, seriously jeopardizing their ability to modernize and the creation of capital which was critical for bringing China in the industrial age. Thus, not only did the Tai-ping rebellion seriously weaken China, but it also impeded both the means and the will to change the country to adapt to modern realities.

I would speculate that if not for these events, China could have modernized and stayed strong enough to at least not fall easy prey to the Western powers and especially Japan. I seriously doubt that Japan could have conceived of mounting a large scale invasion of a modernized China in the 1930's. This also means that this would have modified drastically the balance of power in the Pacific during WW2, which might have led to the Japanese never attacking the Americans at all at Pearl Harbor. America would thus have had to wait for another excuse to enter the war (and perhaps staying out of it altogether), with all the consequences that this entails for WW2 in Europe. This event, almost unknown in the west, thus probably changed the world in a very dramatic way.