During the era of civil war and revolution, both the Nationalists and the Communists saw Hong as 'both model and antecedent'; on one monument chronicling the history of Chinese Revolution, the first section of the relief is devoted to the Heavenly Kingdom, and Sun Yatsen was referred to by his friends as Hong Xiuquan. Mao Zedong was also famous for modeling himself after the Heavenly King, and in the 50s, the party line solidified, calling the Taiping communist, since land was supposed to be equally distributed, and nationalist, since they hated the Manchu. Nowadays, they've added that it was officially feminist, since women were generally equal to men, if forbidden from intermingling with them. The official term for them was 'Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Revolutionary Movement.'

Since then, though, the party has gotten somewhat colder towards them; on the 150th anniversary of the Jintian Uprising, there was a TV special, whose view on the Taiping was summarized by Stephen Platt as 'On the one hand, they were great strivers for freedom, but on the other, they sowed a lot of disorder and the kings were kind of crazy.' In the 1980s, a three volume novelization of Zeng Guofan's life (he was the principle general fighting the Taiping for the war's endgame) kicked off a Zeng Guofan fever; now you can buy self help books based on his life ('How to succeed in business using the strategies of Zeng Guofan,' stuff like that). The movie 'The Warlords' vilifies the Qing and Taiping alike, and the heroes are these characters who raise their own army to fight the Taiping on their terms; the movie was a smash hit and won all the big Hong Kong film awards. Zeng Guofan is still widely considered a traitor to the Han, though, since he killed thousands upon thousands of his countrymen to keep the Manchu in power.

On the other hand, Hong Xiuquan's cousin and head of government, Hong Rengan, is holding up pretty well; the government likes his modernizing program (in 1850, he was envisioning a China with its own steamships, railroads, banks, insurance companies), and the fact that he wasn't an absolute nut like his cousin. Platt's conclusion is that they want to tap into the revolutionary, nationalist zeal to reframe Deng Xiaoping's reforms as the completion of Hong Rengan's vision of a modern, industrial China. Part of this is because the government in the 2010s is in a much different position than in the 1950s; back then, they had just overthrown the nationalists, and were the radical revolutionaries. Nowadays, they're at the top, and they'd quite like to stay that way, so peasant rebellion is no longer useful to them.