> Unchecked by a free press and substantive democracy, Mao led his country
> into catastrope.
As Hinton's many books (as well as other sources) document in some detail, neither Mao nor the central leadership of the CPC ever had *that* much control over everything that went right *or* wrong in China. It was a rather big nation with (by the standard of the "firstworld) a rather undeveloped infrastructure. A "free press" (whatever that might have meant under such conditions) would have been quite ineffective and probably utterly incoherent -- adjectives not wholly inapplicable to the "controlled press" of the time.
Now, Chou En Lai may have been a liar (or my memory may be playing me false) but he claimed in an interview that one of the major sources of the famine was in the over-anxiousness of the local units to report success, and accordingly to submit their grain tax based on the production claimed rather than the actual production. As a result the central government really didn't know that shortages were developing until well after the fact. Attempts to re-distribute available grain were then stymied by the poor transporation infrastructure (rail, road, mountain trail, what have you).
Whether this is correct or not (and to deny it means calling Chou either a liar or a fool), it is silly to bring the concept of "substantive democracy" to bear on China at that time. It would have been socially and physically impossible at the national or even at the regional level. At the local level China probably, in many instances, had the world's most substantive democracy since the collapse of the ancient Athenian Republic.
Carrol