> My real question was about what is the base line of acceptable body
> counts -- how is it established.
The only truly acceptable body count is zero, of course. It doesn't matter that this is impossible; the point of the Resistance should be to diminish the violence of prehistory, however much we can (sometimes this means using a limited amount of force, of course).
> Also, were events
> like the Cultural Revolution aberrations or logical outcomes of policies
> pursued?
This is something I've been looking at, in the context of some literary research on Chinese writer Can Xue. Part of it was geopolitics: the war in Vietnam was raging at its height, Mao and the top leadership were preparing for the possibility of a direct US invasion. There was a huge industrialization push in remote mountain regions, the so-called "Third Line" project -- roughly comparable to the USSR's period of wartime industrialization. Part of it was Mao running off the rails, though, in a classic case of the violence of modernization recoiling on itself.
-- DRR