What I’ve read/heard is that the main reason for the famines came down to over-reporting yields. The local level would inflate their numbers a few percent, then the regional level would inflate their numbers a few percent, and then at the national level they’d use those numbers to make decisions. Based on the numbers received, they were like, “great. we can move X amount of food into the urban areas.” That left the rural populations with not enough food.

The main victims of the famine were the peasants, who made up Mao’s main base of support. So the idea that it was intentionally engineered is ridiculous. It was a combination of the misreporting, bad sweeping policy changes like the sparrows, and the general tumult of recovering from decades of decline, occupation and war