Snake Featherston
Banned
The Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming Dynasty, was indeed who I was thinking of. Mao Zedong as well, though he came after Hitler. Arguably Germany and China are comparable here- a revolution had produced a power vacuum, the old order was delegitimized but there was nothing obvious to replace it, the leaders of the revolution stumbled out of the gate.
Not to mention Han Gaozu. Guy's a peasant, becomes founding Emperor of the dynasty that gives the world's largest ethnic group its name....doesn't get any better than that.
And the circumstances first of the conquest of the Qin and then the brief flowering and rapid crash of the dynasty, plus Bang Liu's uniting all of China in one big happy dynastic Empire like that is ASB. I think if someone wrote a TL like that, it'd be called a China-wank.