... Europe was already well on their way forward

Europe and other democracies have clearly the better solutions, that's what I say, too.

Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian historian and China expert, wrote a great book published in 2010, "Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe".

The Independent published an interview with Mr. Dikötter to speak about this book.

[The book] reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he [Dikötter] studied ...

Frank Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance.

"[Mao's Great Famine] ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

The policy against citizens was abhorrent:

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Dikötter said the archives were already illuminating the extent of the atrocities of the period; one piece of evidence revealed that 13,000 opponents of the new regime were killed in one region alone, in just three weeks.

And this is just one book. There are many more. That all clearly say that Mao was the biggest killer in history, Under Mao’s regime, more people have died than under any other dictators, including Hitler and Stalin.

Edit: It is important to note that the sources for this book come from the Chinese archives that were reopened in the 2000s. These are documents written and published by the Chinese Communist Party.