There’s no playbook for undoing colonial rule at mass scale. Said colonial rule prevented China from participating in the industrial revolution, so converting an agrarian economy to an industrial one is in fact undoing colonial rule.

So yeah, they made mistakes and a lot of people died. I’m not going to glorify Mao but you can’t argue with results. The Great Leap Forward largely succeeded, they just realized it needed to be rolled out at a smaller scale over a longer period of time.