Well yes, but actually no, but actually yes.

The simple fact is that rebellions sprang up all over the Qing Empire in wildly diverse contexts. Secret society elements fomented the Red Turban Rebellion in Guangdong (1854-6) and the Small Sword Rebellion in Shanghai (1853-5); rural bandits in north China started the Nian Rebellion (1851-68); the Yunnanese revolted in what became known as the Panthay Rebellion (1856-73); indigenous tribes like the Miao also rebelled (1854-73); later on, Muslims in Gansu and Shaanxi rebelled in the 'Dungan Revolt' (1862-75) and in turn enabled a Turkic revolt in Altishahr (1863-78). While the massive crisis caused by the early success of the Taiping accelerated the transition from dissent to rebellion, it is very clear that conditions had long been moving in that direction. Rebellion had been endemic from the 1770s onward, culminating in the 1813 Eight Trigrams Rebellion which came close to assassinating the Jiaqing Emperor, and while tensions abated afterward, Qing conduct during the Opium War suggests officials and generals were constantly on guard for 'Han traitors'. Even if the Taiping specifically did not successfully emerge in Guangxi and in turn capitalise on conditions on the Yangtze, there is much to suggest that rebellious sentiment was nevertheless high in both regions – most saliently, the fact that many from these regions did choose to back the rebels.

At the same time, it is hard to say that something like Taiping revolt and the way it happened would have been at all replicable without Hong Xiuquan and the unique syncretised religious agenda he promulgated. By interpreting the Bible through the lens of native Confucian and to some extent Buddhist interpretation, the relatively common message of utopian millenarianism was combined with a number of distinctive practical aspects, including radical socioeconomic reforms. On a more specific point, the Taiping decision to abandon Guangxi and advance on Nanjing, but establish themselves in Nanjing rather than fully commit northwards, has been argued to have had a religious as well as a strategic dimension. Moreover, the Taiping religious message was one very much directed towards the Han and against the Manchus, offering a religious basis for providing coherence to a coalescing Han Chinese ethnic identity at a time when Manchu government was being increasingly questioned. Nevertheless, that questioning was the product of economic stress, domestic military disasters like the White Lotus Rebellion, and growing ethnic tensions, all issues that had been extant many years before.

As for the Opium War, while there was certainly disruption in some areas, especially Guangdong, the sorts of empire-wide crisis that came in the 1850s cannot have been the result of any apparent destabilisation due to foreign intervention. This was a disaster decades, if not centuries in the making, and European involvement in China, like Taiping influence in Gansu or Shanghai, could only have accelerated, not initiated, the process of the formation of these uprisings.

So from a structural standpoint, there was plenty of existing unrest that the Taiping capitalised on, and which would exist independently of them. But from a more contingent perspective, something on the scale of the Taiping may well only have been possible with the Taiping specifically.