You know some history. Most people who are reading that Atlantic article don't have this context at all. This is because people get their history from movies, and Hollywood chooses to make movies like the Karate Kid remake (about anti-black racism in China) or this Red Dawn farce rather than movies about the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, about the consequences of being "idealistic" and "ideological".
"Ideological" is bad. It's not good. It led to a lot of people dying. And the support for "oppressed peoples" that the OP thinks so much of is intimately tied to the rhetoric of communism, which is invariably and horrifically belied by the reality. To repeat said rhetoric uncritically is to bury those people again. Their deaths were denied in speeches at the time and they are glossed over in writing today. This is wrong. We need to remember them.
So yeah, unfortunately I don't think you can hold up the Maoist era as comparatively positive in any substantive regard without acknowledging that said act is morally equivalent to "Mussolini/Hitler made the trains run on time."
And the thing is - Mao didn't even make the trains run on time. He destroyed China to such an extent that people were forced to eat each other's children to survive.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/books/horror-of-a-hidden-c...
For the party newspaper to tell people that it was good
for them to eat less at a time when it was also spinning
fantasies about the bounty being engendered by the Great
Leap was a relatively small, if telling, irony. At the
larger, horrific center of Mr. Becker's account is the
widespread resort among the Chinese people to that most
sickening form of desperation: cannibalism, the selling of
human flesh on the market, the swapping of children so
people could use them for food without committing the
additional sin of eating their own.
It has of course been known for many years that the Great
Leap produced a terrible calamity in China lasting from
roughly 1959 to 1962. But Mr. Becker, who is the Beijing
bureau chief of The South China Morning Post, has written
the most compelling and complete account of that calamity,
describing it systematically as it affected the
countryside, the cities and the immense network of camps
for ''rightists'' and other political prisoners that China
maintained at the time.
However, pollution has also gotten worse. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao? In a village I know, the central government is now paying for a landfill. This is great, since now the villagers won't throw their non-recyclable household waste into the river. Can I mention that without mentioning the sins of Mao?
This article was about black people in China, not Mao, not the Great Leap Forward, not the Cultural Revolution, and you are changing the subject.