Mao’s name has long been in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s greatest killer. Back when I was a kid, the number was listed as 25 million. I guess that we just need to revise the number upward.
Adjust for inflation.
After a while it almost doesn’t matter how many. Members of my extended family have survived Japanese occupation, the 1949 “Liberation,” the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. During the Great Leap, they often saw the dead lying on the road and “eating” meant a meal of watery rice broth with a piece of bark and insects. Their big “treat” were rats captured chewing on a corpse.