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?? What world are you from???

Not sure the context from which you are asking this question.

Mao was a evil man, who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. However, his single most deadly act, imposing the Great Leap Forward, was a bureaucratic act. Mao decreed collectivization of agriculture and would not budge from that path. Local officials would not dare challenge his faulty assumptions, and a famine that killed 30-55 million people resulted.

Compared to that bureaucratic atrocity, the Chinese Civil War killed 2-3 million, his inaction against the Japanese invasion of China (to weaken his rivals), was indirectly responsible for an unknown portion of the 15-20 Chinese war dead, and the Cultural Revolution killed between 1-20 million.

Even with the worst numbers, Mao still kills more people through incompetence, than though direct, indirect, and influenced acts of violence. Making him unique among monstrous world leaders.

"To be fair, during the Great Leap Forward (mid 1950's) an estimated 20-40 million people died, but from incompetence, not malice. Mao didn't try to kill them, but didn't particularly care that they died. He thought that a famine was a small price to pay to advance global revolutionary theory. "

I'm not sure why you seem to be white washing Mao's record and concentrating on only one portion. "To be fair "? Who the hell wants to be fair to a mass murderer?? I have a friend who's physician parents were taken away and never heard from again, for the only crime of being educated. Don't tell the public Mao 'didn't mean to kill people'. That is outright false and a mischaracterization of his character. The comment you were replying to didn't reference the Leap, it was more general, but you seem to be taking an apologetic tact....really unnerving.

He's a more comprehensive history of Mao, not just the part you decided to defend him with...

"According to the authoritative “Black Book of Communism,” an estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with -- by execution, imprisonment or forced famine.
For Mao, the No. 1 enemy was the intellectual. The so-called Great Helmsman reveled in his blood-letting, boasting, “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the China Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.” Mao was referring to a major “accomplishment” of the Great Cultural Revolution, which from 1966-1976 transformed China into a great House of Fear.
The most inhumane example of Mao’s contempt for human life came when he ordered the collectivization of China’s agriculture under the ironic slogan, the “Great Leap Forward.” A deadly combination of lies about grain production, disastrous farming methods (profitable tea plantations, for example, were turned into rice fields), and misdistribution of food produced the worse famine in human history.
Deaths from hunger reached more than 50 percent in some Chinese villages. The total number of dead from 1959 to 1961 was between 30 million and 40 million -- the population of California.

Rounding up enemies
Only five years later, when he sensed that revolutionary fervor in China was waning, Mao proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Gangs of Red Guards -- young men and women between 14 and 21 -- roamed the cities targeting revisionists and other enemies of the state, especially teachers.
Professors were dressed in grotesque clothes and dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink. They were then forced to get down on all fours and bark like dogs. Some were beaten to death, some even eaten -- all for the promulgation of Maoism. A reluctant Mao finally called in the Red Army to put down the marauding Red Guards when they began attacking Communist Party members, but not before 1 million Chinese died.
All the while, Mao kept expanding the laogai, a system of 1,000 forced labor camps throughout China. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in labor camps, has estimated that from the 1950s through the 1980s, 50 million Chinese passed through the Chinese version of the Soviet gulag. Twenty million died as a result of the primitive living conditions and 14-hour work days.
Such calculated cruelty exemplified his Al Capone philosophy: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
And yet Mao Zedong remains the most honored figure in the Chinese Communist Party." SOURCE: https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder