China Hand claims that Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward was responsible for a mere 100,000's of deaths. The standard estimate is 10-30 million. And blaming the peasants for it is a little harsh, since the starvation, as I understand it, was due to overly optimistic estimates: the supervisors over-reported to please their superiors, so people thought they had surpluses, and didn't work. So the starvation was basically bad management, but the whole point of communism is that it makes the decisions on behalf of the people. Still, those deaths weren't intentional, so maybe we should put a footnote after Mao's ranking among the killers; The Straight Dope credits his predecessor Chiang Kai-shek with 10 million.