Let me guess...You are making this argument based on the assumption that the mother died
IMMEDIATELY after the birth of her child?
China experienced an overall decline in mortality rate and to this day, China has one of the higher life expectancy figure in Asia. Look at this at a smaller scale...I have two parents and am the only child. By the time I married and have my own family also with only one child, my parents are still living and probably still in the work force. Their replacement birth rate is unequal, there is only me but two of them. The desire is to have parity, of course, but even if there is a lower birth rate, we are talking about a time span of decades until someone dies. The result is that over that time span, we will have a population increase despite the lower replacement birth rate due to increased longevity. My family unit has too low a birth replacement rate, only me to replace my parents and my child to replace me and my wife, but overall our family count doubled from the time of my birth until the birth of my own child.
Crude Birth Rate
For China, the post 'Great Leap Foward' and the 'one child per family' policy population increase cannot deny the existence of families who had more than one child, hid that illegal birth from the government and raised that extra child in secret. By the time he or she is an adult, his or her illegal birth become irrelevant and he or she will be counted into the general population. Your Ethiopia argument failed because Africa's CDR does not offset its CBR the way China's figures has.
For example...
List of countries by death rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Look at China's CDR (7.1 per 1K) compared to Ethiopia (11.5 per 1K).
Now we look at the CBR of both countries just for 1970 alone...
UNICEF - China - Statistics
UNICEF - Ethiopia - Statistics
See the great disparity between the two countries? We can go a little more detailed...
UNdata | record view | Crude death rate (per 1,000 population)
That is the CDR for three countries in the same 5-yr time span.
Now we look at the CBR...
UNdata | record view | Crude birth rate (per 1,000 population)
As we can see within that 5-yr time span, it is the CBR-CDR ratio that mattered. Ethiopia's and China's birth-to-death ratio was roughly 3:1, higher than America's 2:1.
Now we add in life expectancy...
UNdata | record view | Life expectancy at birth, both sexes combined (years)
Mortality rate is independent of the CDR because...
Mortality rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Can be, not must.
From post WW II to 1975, China's life expectancy increased from 35 yrs to 63 yrs...
...But Ethiopia's life expectancy remain statistically unchanged as we can see with 1965-1970 and 1970-1975. Not only that, Africa is known for having a continuous history of natural and manmade disasters and when faced with these events, we can have movements by large groups over time as they tried to escape their misfortunes. This would affect Ethiopia's population count, therefore rendered Ethiopia ineffective in your feeble argument to remove the communists' guilt from China's famine.
China's life expectancy pretty much doubled, which lowered the CDR over time, which explain:
- The steady population increase despite the 'one child per family' policy,
...And...
- How the famine's horrific deaths were recoverable.
This make the famine largely irrelevant to your argument and should be examined as a standalone event. The famine was a communist induced tragedy that you cannot tap dance around. Numbers do not lie but people do. And communists, be they Chinese, Russians or <whoever>, are the greatest liars of all to date.