The most obvious similarity between Nazi and Chinese revolutionary ideology would be their shared belief that the end justifies the means in building a new society.
The Nazis wanted to establish a so-called “racially pure” German Empire, purged of people they regarded as inferior such as Jews and Slavs. To that end, they carried out policies of extermination and terror that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people across Europe, including the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
Chinese communist revolutionaries were no less committed to transforming society on the basis of a radical blueprint. Theirs involved establishing a truly communist society from which so-called exploiter classes would be expelled, leaving the working classes in charge.
To this end, the Chinese Communist Party implemented a series of policies such as the Great Leap Forward—a crash-course attempt to industrialize China—and the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao and...
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his allies launched a massive campaign to restore purity to what they saw as a state ideology that had become infected with capitalistic elements.
The end result of these campaigns was death and suffering on a truly monumental scale, with tens of millions perishing. However, as with the Nazis, those responsible for these disastrous policies believed that no matter how destructive they were or how much suffering they caused, they were ultimately correct, as they would help to usher in the birth of a new society.
What are the similarities in outcomes of the Chinese and Nazi revolutions?
The most obvious similarity in outcome between the Nazi and the Chinese communist revolutions was the death of tens of millions of innocent people.
Both the Nazis and the Chinese communists fervently believed that they had the right answers to every question. Deeply intolerant of any opposition, they mercilessly crushed anyone who got in their way, using terror and extreme violence as their primary methods.
The Nazis set up an extensive network of concentration camps for imprisoning their political opponents. These would later be expanded to house those people the Nazis deemed to be racially inferior, such as Jews, Slavs, and Romani, millions of whom were systematically murdered.
From day one, the Chinese communists carried out systematic acts of terror against their opponents, which led to widespread death and suffering. Official state policies such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would have a similar effect, and on a much larger scale.
As in Nazi-occupied Europe, communist China became a place where life was cheap and where the authorities, believing that the end justified the means, were prepared to sacrifice the lives of millions of innocent people to the official state ideology.