Former Chinese dissident and political prisoner, Minqi Li, a Marxist Professor of Economics at the University of Utah, has produced data showing that even the peak death rates during the Great Leap Forward were in fact quite typical in pre-Communist China. Li (2008) argues that based on the average death rate over the three years of the Great Leap Forward, there were several million fewer lives lost during this period than would have been the case under normal mortality conditions before 1949. [59]
Utsa Patnaik,Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, argues that some of the very high mortality estimates attributed to the Great Leap Forward, are in part a statistical construct, motivated by an underlying political agenda. Patnaik points out the following: "....because China in the single preceding decade of building socialism, had reduced its death rate at a much faster rate (from 29 to 12 comparing 1949 and 1958) than India had, this sharp rise to 25.4 in 1960 in China still meant that this "famine" death rate was virtually the same as the prevalent death rate in India which was 24.6 per thousand in 1960, only 0.8 lower. This latter rate being considered quite "normal" for India, has not attracted the slightest criticism. Further, in both the preceding and the suceeding year India's crude death rate was 8 to 10 per thousand higher than in China."[60]
I will do numbercrunching from census data myself later.