The classic study of the interrelationship between the Opium War and domestic upheaval is Frederic Wakeman's Strangers at the Gate (1966), a work that was highly influential in its own time but falls victim to a number of problems of approach and interpretation which have seen deconstruction in the years since, especially as part of the turn to 'China-centric' historiography in the 1980s.

Wakeman's core thesis is that the Opium War severely disrupted local government and indeed the fabric of local society in Guangdong: the actual fighting weakened the grasp of the Qing state in the region, while militia mobilisation not only filled the perceived void created by Qing weakness, but also emboldened local, Cantonese xenophobia into a wider regional identity consciousness, which entailed not only anti-Western but also anti-Manchu sentiments. This combined with worsening economic conditions, as well as both growing disaffection among the working class and increased consolidation of political influence by the leisure class, to produce prime conditions for revolt. However, Wakeman's focus was on Guangdong, not Guangxi, and so his main subject of analysis was the Red Turban Revolt of 1854-6, not the outbreak of the Taiping War in Guangdong's sister province. The extrapolation of his narrative to encompass Guangxi would be one that even he himself might well have objected to, especially the notion that an economic downturn in the Canton area was the principal inciting factor – after all, how far was the economy of rural Guangxi integrated into that of urban Guangdong?

A further compounding issue is that while Wakeman came down heavily on the side of the foreign conflict lying at the root of the upheavals in Guangdong, a new approach to the issue of Qing decentralisation soon emerged to challenge that position. Philip A. Kuhn, in Rebellion and its Enemies in Late Imperial China (1970), demonstrated that the militia movement whose growth in Guangdong had been attributed to the Opium War had roots in an earlier upheaval in the 1790s, the White Lotus Rebellion. The White Lotus conflict had pitted the Qing against an increasingly amorphous guerrilla movement in central China, and saw repeated failure by the Qing central government to reach a decisive conclusion, marred by corruption among the provincial officials who carried out the war effort on the ground. Amid these conditions, local gentry saw that the existing mechanism of militia mobilisation, which was tied to the tax assessment mechanism (the baojia) and thus based purely on grouping arbitrary numbers of households with no real consideration for geography and personal relations, was proving inadequate for the purposes of rapidly mobilising defence against rebels or bandits. This, in turn, led to the formation of locally-organised militia forces based on village units and social connections rather than arbitrary designation, creating the basis of a militia model that would be transposed to other parts of China. While the Opium War might have accelerated this process in Guangdong in particular, the sorts of local militarisation that Kuhn described were a China-wide phenomenon.

These foundations would be built on when Kuhn and Susan Mann Jones wrote 'Dynastic Decline and the Roots of Rebellion' for the Cambridge History of China in 1978. They stressed that the loss of Qing authority at the provincial level in fact long predated the Opium War and was far from a regional phenomenon. If, as Jones and Kuhn argued, the Taiping uprising was the product of deteriorating class relations amid a growth of gentry power at the expense of officials and peasantry, then it was one decades in the making, with roots stretching across China.

While there has been a little bit of a back-and-forth on Kuhn's analysis, for the most part contemporary historians largely see the broad strokes of Kuhn and Jones' thesis to hold true, even if they would perhaps avoid the somewhat moralistic phrasing of 'dynastic decline'. There have, however, been some modifications: for instance, recent studies of the 'Jiaqing Restoration' period of 1799-1820 have shown that the Qing state itself was willing to engage in decentralisation if the ruling establishment at a given point believed it was preferable to allow local gentry a greater hand in government. To link this to the Taiping War, of course, we must rely on the basic element of Kuhn's 1970 model, that being the notion that there were competing 'orthodox' and 'heterodox', or to put it another way 'elite' and 'popular', attempts to fill the void created by the retreat of Qing authority in local governance, one that is not unproblematic but does still hold up to a reasonable extent as a basic framing.

That is not to say there were no relatively short-term effects of the Opium War. One highlighted by James Polachek in The Inner Opium War was the partial restructuring of the Qing government after the Treaty of Nanjing, in which Manchus were again entrusted with a number of important postings after a period of pro-Han appointments. The replacement of idealistic and reform-minded but dangerously xenophobic Han officials with a more pragmatic set of Manchu officials may have helped ameliorate the Qing's foreign policy problems, but reopened domestic wounds and created disaffection against the Qing state within the Qing state, among allies of the officials who took the fall for the bungling of the war with Britain. Mujangga, the de facto prime minister between 1842 and his effective purging from the Qing state in 1851, was widely perceived as taking a hard pragmatic stance on government and spending most of his administration focussing on maximising revenues and minimising spending. As part of this, there was a significant attempt to get northern Chinese provinces, whose tax quotas had long been ignored, to start forwarding their allotted revenues to the treasury, but the attention placed on ensuring revenue collection closer to the capital reduced attention and interest in rural disturbances in the further provinces of China Proper. In late 1850, one minor official would, in a letter to his mentor, blame Mujangga for creating an environment in which it was impossible to get anything done about rural disturbances – including the now-substantial buildup of various discontents at Jintian (who would, a few months later, declare themselves the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) – because province-level officials refused to provide resources to prefects or county-level magistrates, or to forward distressing information to the court. So there was at least some clear knock-on effect here, where an indirect consequence of the Opium War was that the Qing were less willing to devote resources towards pre-empting rebellious activity.

On the other hand, there are some areas where arguably the Opium War did little to really change things. Perhaps the most pressing would be ethnic tensions, which as Mark Elliott's article 'Bannerman and Townsman' (1990) shows, had been in evidence long before the Opium War. His article focusses specifically on the series of events surrounding the relationship between the Han civilian population and the Manchu Banner garrison in Zhenjiang during the Opium War, in which there came to be substantial conflict on largely ethnic lines culminating in the garrison commander, Hailing, declaring martial law and effectively besieging Zhenjiang from within while the British tried to take it from without. The development and spread of ethnic discourses in China in the early part of the nineteenth century remains under-studied even today, but what can be suggested is that the Opium War at most highlighted these tensions; it did not create or even necessarily exacerbate them.

And then there are some issues directly tied to the fallout of the Opium War, but these are much harder to draw causal links for. For instance, the outbreak of the Taiping War has often been attributed at least partially to the spread of opium addiction, but the actual effects of opium consumption have always been basically impossible to quantify, and on top of that the exact chain of causality between opium and revolt is rarely well-explained. To put it in brief, 'more people did drugs, therefore a bunch of people found Jesus and tried to overthrow the government' is maybe, just maybe, missing a step or two. In any case, while the growth of opium imports was able to continue because of the Opium War, it had been ongoing long before – hence the war breaking out at all. The relatively large-scale emigration of southern Chinese men to the Americas and Southeast Asia for employment opportunities, which the creation of the Treaty Ports had done much to facilitate, also contributed to the region's increasing economic decline, but the extent to which the Taiping were primarily economically motivated, and the extent to which issues primarily affecting the urban area around Canton would have had noticeable ripples in the Guangxi hinterlands, are both, again, open to question; in addition, if it was primarily economic stress in the Pearl River basin that created the Taiping War, it is worth asking why the comparatively more prosperous lower Yangtze region – particularly the area between Nanjing and Shanghai – ended up as such a secure base area for the Taiping later on.