Mao Zedong

He rendered indelible meritorious service in founding and building up our Party and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army

Comrade Mao Zedong and many leading comrades, both at the centre and in the localities, had become smug about their successes, were impatient for quick results and overestimated the role of man’s subjective will and efforts.

However, in the later part of the meeting, he erred in initiating criticism of Comrade Peng Dehuai and then in launching a Party-wide struggle against “Right opportunism

It was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before.

When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.

He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

His main point is to prove that the Party, from the village chief up to Chairman Mao, knew exactly what was going on but was too warped by ideology to change course until tens of millions had died.

At the Lushan Conference, Mao purged Peng and his supporters, accusing them of “right-opportunism.”

Chastened officials returned to the provinces eager to save their careers, duplicating Mao’s attack on Peng at the local level.

one plausible reading of MGF’s narrative chapters is that it took a long time for the leadership in Beijing to grasp the scale of the catastrophe at its height.

Mao’s private physician, repeatedly invoked by Dikötter as a reliable witness (p. 346), ‘doubted that [Mao] really knew’ what was happening

we are told that Mao was ‘visibly shaken’ when presented with graphic reports of famine from Xinyang in Henan province in late October 1960

Mao Zedong later said that 700,000 people were killed, 1.2 million were imprisoned, and 1.2 million were put under control.

Mao's statement was naturally based on a report made in January 1954 by Xu Zirong, deputy minister of public security.

After liberation, we rooted out a number of counter-revolutionaries. Some were sentenced to death for major crimes. This was absolutely necessary, it was the demand of the masses

In the course of cleaning out counter-revolutionaries good people were sometimes mistaken for bad, and such things still happen today.