> I'm no expert but, first of all, the peasants who died weren't a different ethnic group or a social class antagonistic to Mao

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign

  The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a period in 1956 in the 
  People's Republic of China during which the Communist 
  Party of China (CPC) encouraged its citizens to openly 
  express their opinions of the communist regime. After this 
  brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed 
  course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-
  Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the 
  regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly 
  criticized and condemned to prison labor camps. Mao 
  remarked at the time that he had "enticed the snakes out 
  of their caves."

> Second, AFAIK Mao didn't intentionally set out to kill people

http://laogai.org/our_work/death-penalty-organ-harvesting

  In the thirty years following the establishment of the 
  People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were no clear 
  laws governing executions, which were carried out on a 
  massive scale. In the earliest years, millions of 
  Kuomintang soldiers, landlords, and members of the 
  bourgeois class, seen as threats to the new regime, were 
  killed. In 1950 alone, 2 million people were executed as 
  part of the “Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries” 
  campaign.

  Throughout the Mao period, the number of executions always 
  peaked during political campaigns. In 1971, 100,000 people 
  were executed during a single campaign, one of many such 
  campaigns during the Cultural Revolution period. During 
  these political campaigns, particularly in the 1950s, 
  regional governments were often tasked with meeting 
  execution quotas, premised on Mao’s belief that a certain 
  percentage of the population was always beyond reform.

I can go line by line on the rest - Taiwan's GDP-per-capita was more than 10X the PRC's by 1978; Owen Lattimore and the China Hands gave considerable American support for Mao; and the reason you are repeating "it was just an accident that millions of people died" is that that was the propaganda at the time, also used for the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor).

But really, you should ask yourself why you decided to get into the nasty business of Holocaust Denial. Tens of millions of people died, and they were murdered by Mao, his men, and the communist regime under his total control. Google a bit, read the primary sources from the period. The famine was the same thing that happened in the USSR, and what always happens when farmers have their land stolen by communist regimes. As for the mechanics of how that happened, shooting a farmer in the back of the head or sending him to a prison labor camp wasn't an "accident".

Whether you choose to admit these truths or not is up to you, but it gets to the core of why this point needs to be raised and not simply glossed over by the likes of the OP. Mao was not some mere hapless incompetent as you're trying to portray him, some well-meaning guy who f'd up. He was directly responsible for the largest mass murder in history.