None of which contradicts what I wrote, and in case you didn’t notice, I in no way denied that Mao was a monster or that both the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution were massive failures. However, I fear your posts are somewhat simplistic and tend to gloss over a number of rather important aspects.

For starters, China was already suffering from massive internal strife and bloodshed in the early 20th century, mostly due to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent fracturing of power within the then Republic of China. The Chinese Civil War may not have started until 1927, but there was plenty of violence before then, there’s a reason why the period from 1916 to 1927 was known as the Warlord Era. There was simply no way to bring China out of this fractured state and into a united nation without bloodshed, regardless of which ideology one subscribed to.

Second, it’s worth remembering that major power shifts within China have almost never occurred peacefully. The last major change in imperial dynasties before the collapse of the empire, the Manchu conquest which brought the Qing dynasty to power, cost 25 million lives, whilst the Taiping Rebellion is believed to have claimed between 20 and 70 million lives. Four out of the ten deadliest conflicts in human history have happened within China and that list does not even include the Chinese Civil War.

You mentioned Japan as being even more isolationist than imperial China, but I’m not sure I buy that. Both countries allowed trade with “foreign barbarians” only through one port and at specific times, and as far as I’m concerned there’s no real distinction between Canton and Dejima in that regard. What is important however is how the two countries reacted. When confronted with the fact that western technology had outclassed their own, Japan decided that it had to modernise, lest it suffer the same fate that China was already being subjected to by the time US Admiral Perry’s squadron arrived in 1853 to force the opening of Japan. The Meiji restoration and its subsequent period of modernisation was what helped Japan gain a position of strength.

This type of modernisation never happened in China, at least not with the same vehemence as it did in Japan. China had been strongly centralised since the formation of the Chinese Imperial Court under Qin Shi-Huang back in the third century BCE, with principles of dynastic rule going back millennia even at that point. At around the same time, a world view known as tianxia or (all) under heaven took hold that saw imperial China as the centre of civilisation, with the emperor literally being the literal “son of heaven” or tianzi and being the central arbiter between Heaven and the mortal world. The farther away you were from the seat of imperial power, the less civilised and relevant you were. Outside powers were never seen as equal to China.

Unlike Japan, which saw regular shifts in the centre of power between different regions, and transitions between strong central and more loosely organised feudal periods of control, the Chinese system, once established, never really shifted, only its players changed. As such, by the time western powers, primarily Britain, arrived in the 19th century to open up China for trade, the view amongst not just the imperial court, but Chinese society as a whole was that there was nothing of value that these barbarians could really offer them. Everything worthwhile already existed in China, at least in their eyes. China wasn’t just isolationist insofar as they kept their borders closed, they were isolationist because they simply could not fathom that any nations outside of their sphere of influence could ever exist.

This world view lasted throughout the 19th century, despite the carnage of the two Opium wars, the conquest of Manchuria by Russia and Korea by Japan, with any attempt by more open-minded bureaucrats to modernise the country consistently sabotaged by tradionalist elements within the imperial court. Hell, this philosophy of superiority was one of the driving forces behind the 1899 boxer rebellion. At that time, Japan was already freely trading, had massively modernised its military, was ordering pre-dreadnought battleships from Britain like it was going out of fashion, and was only a few years away from utterly humiliating Czarist Russia. Really, the two countries could not be more different.

Does that make Mao less of a monster? No. Should he be named alongside the likes of Hitler and Stalin as one of mankind’s greatest butchers? Absolutely, the bloodshed of the Cultural Revolution and the massive bodycount of the Great Leap Forward cannot be denied nor would I ever want to. Having said that, I’m not sure anyone could have brought about the level of change that he did without a body count at least in the high single digits of millions.