Was it a deliberate campaign to starve the people of China?
Yes, it was deliberate.
If you
- throw people, including children, into a pond
- cut off someone's nose or ear
- brand someone with hot metal
- force people to work naked in the middle of winter
- ban elderly or sick people from the official canteen and, therefore, starve them to death
then, of course, it is all done deliberately. You can't do such things by 'mistake' ... things like that are not simple mismanagement or something like that. They are deliberate crimes.
And, to make it all worse, Mao is even portrayed as a hero by official narratives. It's not that they don't condemn him, they literally celebrate him. He was a mass murderer as he stands in the line of history with the worst dictators like Hitler and Stalin.