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What a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap. He was an evil, murdering psychopath. It wasn’t that “his policies caused” those deaths, it was that *he* killed those people.

I went to Conservapedia to see what they said, and that's the conservative counterpart to Wikipedia. It's been touted here several times.

Conservapedia on Mao

As the leader of China, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward, an economic plan intended to rapidly industrialize China's then largely rural economy. In the end it proved a ruinous failure, preventing the peasants from producing needed food and causing massive famines; up to 38 million starved to death or were killed for opposing the economic plan.

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Overall, historians believe that around 43 million people died under Mao's rule, due mostly to starvation from disastrous socialist economic policies such as the "Great Leap Forward" but now known in China as The Three Years of Disaters. This is 7 times the common figure given for the Holocaust but it is much less known.

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In their book Mao: The Unknown Story, authors Jung Chang and Jon Halliday state that in his first five years of power, 700,000 were claimed by Mao to be dead, but another 700,000 died in local excesses and 700,000 committed suicide out of fear of Mao. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao deliberately killed peasants by shipping food to the USSR and Eastern Europe in exchange for aid in building arms plants. As well, Mao's plans for peasants to make steel and build canals meant that in 1959-60 nobody grew any food. Thus, the worst famine in history occurred. Huge numbers were killed by puppets of Mao in the Cultural Revolution, which actually was launched to get rid of Mao's rivals in the Chinese Communist Party.

And here is Wikipedia on Mao

Mao's policies and political purges from 1949 to 1975 are widely believed to have caused the deaths of between 50 to 70 million people.
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Under the direction of Mao, it is reported that horrible methods of torture took place[15] and given names such as sitting in a sedan chair, airplane ride, toad-drinking water, and monkey pulling reins."[15] The wives of several suspects had their breasts cut open and their genitals burned.[15] It has been estimated that 'tens of thousands' of suspected enemies,[16] perhaps as many as 186,000,[17] were killed during this purge. Critics accuse Mao's authority in Jiangxi of being secured and reassured through the revolutionary terrorism, or red terrorism.[18]
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In 1948, the People’s Liberation Army starved out the Kuomintang forces occupying the city of Changchun. At least 160,000 civilians are believed to have perished during the siege, which lasted from June until October. PLA lieutenant colonel Zhang Zhenglu, who documented the siege in his book White Snow, Red Blood, compared it to Hiroshima: “The casualties were about the same. Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.”[23]
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Along with Land reform, during which significant numbers of landlords were beaten to death at mass meetings organized by the CPC as land was taken from them and given to poorer peasants,[26] there was also the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries,[27] which involved public executions targeting mainly former Kuomintang officials, businessmen accused of "disturbing" the market, former employees of Western companies and intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect.[28] The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign.[29]
Mao himself claimed that a total of 700,000 people were executed during the years 1949–53.[30] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[31] the number of deaths range between 2 million[31][32] and 5 million.[33][34] In addition, at least 1.5 million people,[35] perhaps as many as 4 to 6 million,[36] were sent to "reform through labour" camps where many perished.[36] Mao played a personal role in organizing the mass repressions and established a system of execution quotas,[37] which were often exceeded.[27] Nevertheless he defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[38]
Starting in 1951, Mao initiated two successive movements in an effort to rid urban areas of corruption by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents, known as the three-anti/five-anti campaigns. A climate of raw terror developed as workers denounced their bosses, wives turned on their husbands, and children informed on their parents; the victims often being humiliated at struggle sessions, a method designed to intimidate and terrify people to the maximum. Mao insisted that minor offenders be criticized and reformed or sent to labor camps, "while the worst among them should be shot." These campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide.[39] In Shanghai, people jumping to their deaths became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them.[40] Some biographers have pointed out that driving those perceived as enemies to suicide was a common tactic during the Mao-era. For example, in his biography of Mao, Philip Short notes that in the Yan'an Rectification Movement, Mao gave explicit instructions that "no cadre is to be killed," but in practice allowed security chief Kang Sheng to drive opponents to suicide and that "this pattern was repeated throughout his leadership of the People's Republic."[41]
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Programs pursued during this time include the Hundred Flowers Campaign, in which Mao indicated his supposed willingness to consider different opinions about how China should be governed. Given the freedom to express themselves, liberal and intellectual Chinese began opposing the Communist Party and questioning its leadership. This was initially tolerated and encouraged. After a few months, Mao's government reversed its policy and persecuted those, totalling perhaps 500,000, who criticized, as well as those who were merely alleged to have criticized, the Party in what is called the Anti-Rightist Movement. Authors such as Jung Chang have alleged that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was merely a ruse to root out "dangerous" thinking.[42]
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There is a great deal of controversy over the number of deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Until the mid 1980s, when official census figures were finally published by the Chinese Government, little was known about the scale of the disaster in the Chinese countryside, as the handful of Western observers allowed access during this time had been restricted to model villages where they were deceived into believing that Great Leap Forward had been a great success.

And there is a lot more mixed in with a phrase or a sentence here and there...

SO... in comparing the two, between Wikipedia and Conservapedia... I would say that Wikipedia presents a much more gruesome picture of Mao than does Conservapedia by a long shot.

And it looks fairly accurate to me...

In addition, I would say that you could go to any encyclopedic entry (either a Encyclopedia Brittanica or any other encyclopedia that you could name), and you won't be coming up with any more than this.

Of course, there are books written by authors, but Conservapedia and Wikipedia are not books, but are encyclopedias, referencing other sources like books and articles and so on.

And I don't find a problem with the Mao article and neither do I find a problem with those entries I gave you up above. And since you don't fine any problems either fromt those entries I included to you, I'll assume that your problems are solely with it not being a "book" and it doesn't include enough information... LOL...

I think if you're looking for a complete history in book form..., you need to go to Amazon.com. You're just in the wrong place. This is an encyclopedia on the net, not a book... :-)