And Mao personally executed 40 million people, huh? There wasn’t an entire ecosystem of officials fabricating reports at every level? His head of state security gets no credit for making everyone afraid to tell the truth?
Hell, the obnoxious thing about it is all it really does it blame the wrong single communist, people go on about the sparrows but Lysenkoism had destroyed crop yields before they got exterminated.
So, yes, it is as absurd to blame Mao entirely for The Great Leap Forward as it is to blame a Serbian assassin for WW1. There were cultural considerations, treaties, idiot officials, an agricultural policy built almost entirely on fraud, etc etc.
The most devastating thing about the Great Leap Forward is that the famine was entirely preventable if people weren’t afraid to tell the truth, and that simply isn’t a situation that can be built by one person.
Hell, there were good crops left to rot because the workers had left for the industrialization projects in the cities. Do you think Mao personally said “fuck that rice, go build some tractors?”