> 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
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
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).
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.