Like it says on the tin. Suppose that
Hong Xiuquan passes the imperial Chinese examinations the first time (instead of trying four times and failing), and becomes a scholar-bureaucrat who holds an administrative post somewhere in Guangdong. This means he's not insane (or is at least less so than OTL) and has genuine experience as an administrator,
In which case, he does not get involved in the local syncretic Christianity scene in his local area or take it over and turn it in the direction he did. Literally zero chance.
Edit: and to be clear, there was a cottage industry in China of local Protestant converts going among the heathen masses to convert them and ending up with weird heresies that no self-respecting Christian would call Christianity, but Hong Xiuquan was something special in that he had more luck than most, he gathered a cadre of somewhat talented lieutenants around him early on, he preached an extra-militant religion, and the local provincial authorities were not up to the task of quickly snuffing him out. Without Hong Xiuquan, it's definitely possible that someone else could've done something similar, but it's very unlikely.
For context, the whole "visions from God" thing was part of a psychotic breakdown that happened to Hong Xiuquan because of the stress of taking the exam and failing yet again. This isn't just an entrance exam into government life: it's also the ticket to entry into the gentry class and the privileges thereof. It is basically the end-all be-all of
being a somebody in China. People studied (and ran up huge debts) for decades for this opportunity and it was considered normal for someone to only pass the first exam in their thirties. When you passed your first test, you functionally had a window of about thirty years in which to either stay in your area and establish as many connections and bribery networks as you could(*) or else to climb the career ladder as far as possible(**). And of course, as soon as you got into office, your first order of business would be to recoup your family's investment in your future and clear that massive debt you probably incurred during your tutoring.
Even then, there were huge masses of people who never passed a single exam in their life despite decades of hard work and dedication, and who were basically relegated to auxiliary work at the local level.(***) The passing quota for the imperial exams was kept artificially low by the government and everybody recognized that it was as much about being a perfect student as about luck of the draw or connections/bribing the examiner to pass. You could 100% on everything and you still might not pass because there are just too many students and not enough positions. The first exam was the really difficult part, because that was where hundreds of thousands of people showed up every year to compete for a few tens of thousands of jobs. After that, your competition was restricted to your fellow officials, not all of whom were interested in rising up the ranks. Many of them would in fact be more concerned with protecting their family's interests in their home province.
You start to see the problem here: if Hong Xiuquan passes, all the stresses in his life that culminated in the psychotic breakdown
don't happen and he's basically guaranteed to become yet another unexceptional low-rung official. Then again, maybe there's a timeline in which he rises up the ranks and becomes a viceroy or something like that.
(*): because lower-level government salaries and budgets were chronically low, especially once inflation really started rearing its head in the 1790s and 1820s, so people were forced to engage in graft and bribery just to ensure a comfortable life for themselves on the one hand while keeping a balanced budget on the other. Most of your power as an official came not from your title's authority, but from the local gentry families you'd developed relationships with and whom you could count on to provide cheap labor for the state in exchange for bribes or favors.
(**): where the salaries were better.
(***): like tutoring for families trying to get their sons into the government
diminishing the internal divisions in the Taiping ranks that led to the
Tianjing Incident IOTL. Thus, by 1850s (or 60s at the latest) the Heavenly kingdom takes control of Beijing and effectively ends the Qing dynasty.
No Taiping, for one. If he becomes an official, he probably never meets the proto-Taiping in the first place. He certainly doesn't take up with them because they are a much less profitable endeavor than a career in government would be. Which means that the proto-Taiping probably remain a fringe cult on the margins of society, just like Anton Drexler's DAP was before Hitler came along and turned it into the NSDAP.
So the question is, what would China look like in this scenario, culturally, economically and politically speaking? Would Manchuria, Xinjiang, Mongolia and Tibet become independent from China proper, or would those territories eventually be brought back into the fold by the Taiping government?
Immeasurably better off, especially if Cixi doesn't come to power either.
Taiping was one of many rebellions in the 1850s, but it was the largest and its size allowed the other rebellions to stick around for far longer than they should have while the government was busy trying to deal with it. As it was, Taiping basically gutted the entire Yangtze river valley, both because of its incredibly brutal and genocidal tactics toward anyone who didn't conform loudly enough to its ideology and because of the government's typically Confucian response to the rebellion.
I say "typically Confucian", because that's what it was. According to Confucian ideology, if a family member does a crime, his family is actually obliged to protect him from the government. From a citizen's POV, this is surprisingly based. From the government's POV, this means that literally everyone in the family of a rebel is just as culpable as the rebel, because it is their obligation to give aid to him and to seek revenge for him if he is executed. So when the government cracked down on rebels, it basically amounted to a genocide every time.(*) And because the troops were also shittily-paid, they also had a tendency to loot and plunder everything around them and make the rebellion worse.
All this means that the suppression of the Taiping + all the other rebellions basically amounted to a giant back-and-forth between three or four different armies of bandits over the same area who absolutely trashed it by the end. Much of China was in a state of economic collapse after the rebellions were over. The shorter the rebellion is, the better.
(*): and yes, there is a direct link between this and what the Taiping did to areas they conquered. It was a product of shared cultural underpinnings.
(**) which wasn't helped by the fact that Cixi's government doled out little money for reconstruction efforts and basically left provincial governors to deal with the aftermath on their own because she was an exceptional greedy and corrupt cunt whose main interest was sucking the government dry in order to satisfy her cronies and keep her arse in power, and damn the national interest! CIXI DELENDA EST
He would be exposed to Western philosophy and culture, making him much less fanatical than OTL.
In which case, he would be
an actual fucking Christian and wouldn't have done anything he did IOTL. End of story.
