Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. (…) At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years (…) Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago.
Of course even this level of needless calamity has its apologists. One commenter writes:
It was mismanaged, but what big thing isn’t? More importantly, it was the MORALLY correct thing to do.
