Just in general, the deaths argument is really bad. Under Mao Chinese life expectancy more than doubled - even if we take at face value the largest estimates for the famine, far, far more people lived longer, happier, and healthier lives as a result of Mao’s policies than had their lives ended prematurely by them.

And that’s before getting into the incredibly muddy waters of culpability - the famine was preceded by a drought, how many of the deaths then are the CPC’s fault and how many are strictly the fault of nature? The CPC in part worsened the famine by implementing bad agricultural science - but they didn’t know it was bad agricultural science at the time, should they be held responsible for it anyway? And so on and so on.