Comparing absolute numbers isn't fair to China, but look at the percentage of the population that starved in each country during those relative time periods.
I just don't think any of that is related to the economic system. It's pretty clearly the result of China having a lot more subsistence farmers when they industrialized.
But it is, at least their political system. But those are pretty intertwined in China, especially in that period.
They imported Lysenkoism from the soviets (who also had massive famines while implementing it).
Which is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to give control of the means of production to the politicians. There are a lot of things that sound good to a politician, but are a bad idea in practice.