"Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and historical responsibility for the human disaster that resulted from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him. It was not Mao's intention to kill off a portion of the peasantry, as Becker and others imply. There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions, however horrible those consequences might be, and deliberate and willful genocide. The blurring of that difference does no service to the task of understanding the terrible moral ambiguities of this most genocidal of all centuries."