Thanks Ken, I think those statistics are a footnote to Mao's ruinous socio-economic policies beginning in 1955 when he accelerated collective farming, then in 1958 launched the Great Leap Forward directly into mass starvation of 20-50 Mil Chinese by the early 1960s and capped it off with the Cultural Revolution which utterly ground any hope of Chinese economic modernization to a halt..Mao would have done the Chinese people a great favor if he retired in 1950 after initial land reform..