The rebellion marked the high point in political tension over allowing Mongols to be employed in the Ming military command structure.

Ming Chinese officials often made recompense with Mongol subordinates for military merits while at the same time strategically relocating their troops and families away from the capital.

[2] Others fled their homeland on the northern steppe due to natural disasters such as droughts, seeking refuge in China where Mongol families found lodging and hospitality.

[3] Some Mongols became distinguished military officers, were granted noble ranks, and on rarer occasions became ministers in the state bureaucracy.

[6][7] On July 20, 1461, after Mongols had staged raids into Ming territory along the northern tracts of the Yellow River, the Minister of War Ma Ang (馬昂; 1399–1476) and General Sun Tang (孫鏜; died 1471) were appointed to lead a force of 15,000 troops to bolster the defenses of Shaanxi.

[10] Lu Gao (逯杲; died 1461), head officer of the Imperial Guard, had arrested the missing soldier with approval of the Emperor.

[10] General Shi Heng (石亨; died 1459), who aided Tianshun's succession, starved to death in prison after a similar warning from an imperial edict.

[13][14] The loyalty of Cao's Mongol-officer clients was secure due to circumstances of thousands of military officers who had to accept demotions in 1457 because of earlier promotions in aiding Jingtai's succession.

[15] The conspirators are said to have planned to place their heir apparent on the throne and demote Tianshun's position to "grand senior emperor", the title delegated to him during the years of his house arrest from 1450 to 1457, under Jingtai's rule.

[20] Li Xian agreed to draft a memorial to the throne explaining that Cao Qin wished the emperor no harm, that his vengeance against Lu Gao was finished, and asked for an imperial pardon.

[25] On August 8, Cao Jixiang was publicly dismembered, a sentence and execution which ministers of state were made aware of by the Tianshun Emperor once he held an audience at the Median Gate.

[28] On August 9, the Mongol officer Wu Cong was put in charge of the Chief Military Commission of the Left; in September, twenty taels of silver and two-hundred piculs of grain were added to his stipend.

[34] A native rebellion would not threaten the capital city again until the fall of Beijing to the army of Li Zicheng in 1644, marking the end of the dynasty and, shortly after, the beginning of Manchu conquest.

Until the conquest of the Manchu Qing dynasty, Chinese officials continued to show a large degree of apprehension over Mongols in military service to the Ming, and still favored relocation schemes.

[36] The general Chinese history texts on the Ming Dynasty, including the Mingdai Shi and the Mingshi, briefly mention Cao Qin's failed coup of 1461.

[43][44] Henry Serruys, whom Robinson calls "the most authoritative writer on the Ming Mongols", did not mention this rebellion in any of his written works.

[45] Historians Tang Gang and Nan Bingwen remark in their 1985 publication of the Mingshi that the 1461 coup weakened the power of Ming rule.

The historian Okuyama Norio wrote an essay in 1977 arguing that Cao Qin's coup of 1461 should be understood as a single event in the wider context of continuous power struggles between civil officials and military officers during Tianshun's reign.