> I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

> I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a period in 1956 in the People's Republic of China during which the Communist Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly express their opinions of the communist regime. After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti- Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves." > Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting In the thirty years following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were no clear laws governing executions, which were carried out on a massive scale. In the earliest years, millions of Kuomintang soldiers, landlords, and members of the bourgeois class, seen as threats to the new regime, were killed. In 1950 alone, 2 million people were executed as part of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” campaign. Throughout the Mao period, the number of executions always peaked during political campaigns. In 1971, 100,000 people were executed during a single campaign, one of many such campaigns during the Cultural Revolution period. During these political campaigns, particularly in the 1950s, regional governments were often tasked with meeting execution quotas, premised on Mao’s belief that a certain percentage of the population was always beyond reform. I can go line by line on the rest - Taiwan's GDP-per-capita was more than 10X the PRC's by 1978; Owen Lattimore and the China Hands gave considerable American support for Mao; and the reason you are repeating "it was just an accident that millions of people died" is that that was the propaganda at the time, also used for the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor). But really, you should ask yourself why you decided to get into the nasty business of Holocaust Denial. Tens of millions of people died, and they were murdered by Mao, his men, and the communist regime under his total control. Google a bit, read the primary sources from the period. The famine was the same thing that happened in the USSR, and what always happens when farmers have their land stolen by communist regimes. As for the mechanics of how that happened, shooting a farmer in the back of the head or sending him to a prison labor camp wasn't an "accident". Whether you choose to admit these truths or not is up to you, but it gets to the core of why this point needs to be raised and not simply glossed over by the likes of the OP. Mao was not some mere hapless incompetent as you're trying to portray him, some well-meaning guy who f'd up. He was directly responsible for the largest mass murder in history.