Story here in the left-wing UK Independent. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)
Excerpt:
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing “one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known”.
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
…Mr Dikötter said that he was once again examining the Party’s archives for his next book, The Tragedy of Liberation, which will deal with the bloody advent of Communism in China from 1944 to 1957.
He 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. “We know the outline of what went on but I will be looking into precisely what happened in this period, how it happened, and the human experiences behind the history,” he said.
Standard disclaimer applies for Ace of Spades link – prepare to read curse words.
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WINTERY KNIGHT 
You forgot to mention the militantly *atheist* communist, Mao Zedong. (It’s generally understood that communists on Mao’s scale are atheists, but it bears repeating since modern atheists love to ignore/minimize/forget/obfuscate the human rights record of their brethren.)
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I’ll fix it now. It did occur to me afterwards.
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Thank you for posting this. This is an often forgotten tragedy. I recently watched Mao’s Last Dancer, which is a true story set against this backdrop, and the extent of oppression was brought freshly to mind.
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