[commandlinefan]

> still think these policies and these people were 'well-meaning'

It’s awfully hard to imagine that Mao actually was hoping that people would die, and that they would die en masse of starvation: even if he was strictly self-serving and heartless, he must have known in the back of his mind that huge populations of starving people are unpredictable and difficult to govern. The only way I can picture this taking place is that he (like all dictators) successfully instilled such fear in his direct reports that they never gave him bad news or challenged what he thought sounded like good ideas at the time.

[AlanYx]

Mao had an awareness of what was going on. For example, like the Soviets during the Ukraine famine, Mao's government intentionally outlawed starvation being listed as a cause of death. He was also so utterly convinced of the correctness of his ideologically informed ideas about farming (e.g., he was under the spell of Lysenko's ideas about unproductively close spacing because crops of the same "class" would never compete with each other) that he would choose to blame failures on people's lack of purity for correctly following his ideas and on imagined conspiracies of deposed landlords.

However, what you're saying is also true; there are documented historical examples of local officials, terrified of Mao, setting up faked fields with scarce crops from the neighboring area being transplanted into a single field specifically to "impress" Mao during his visits and avoid his ire.

[Spooky23]

I wouldn't be so sure.

Mao was focused on re-imagining the state and purging old ways of thinking, governance, etc. The insanity of the cultural revolution is a testament to that.

[lacampbell]

How do we know?

Remember the Nazis were brought before an international court. The CCP never had a Nuremberg.