Comment Re:China is known to hide the truth, change histor (Score 3, Informative) 104
Maybe a few million. The Great Leap Forward, a decade earlier, killed tens of millions. The conclusion we can draw from this is that Mao really didn't give a damn about human life. The Great Leap Forward had been about showing the Chinese populace and the world how incredibly great Mao's version of Marxism was, and ending up in mass famine. So discredited was Mao by this that people Deng Xiaoping managed to sideline him and bring some sanity back to the government. Mao didn't like being sidelined by his underlings, so sparked the Cultural Revolution to destabilize Chinese society and wrest power from Deng and Co., which he did, and Deng and the other reformers were sent off to be "re-educated". In the end Deng won; after Mao's death and the attempted coup by the Gang of Four, Deng was "rehabilitated" and handed power, and it is Deng Xiaoping who actually turned China around.
Sadly the lessons of that period seem to have been forgotten.