Am I a Co-conspirator in the Anti-Mao Movement?

I had a rather disquieting, though brief, conversation last evening about Mao Zedong, Though presenting no concrete evidence to justify the claim, one of my students from China made the argument that Mao was personally responsible for all the deaths that occurred during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, including the deaths of four generals in the People's Liberation Army. Now I don't pretend to know what Mao did or did not do, but I have for some time suspected, based on actual evidence, that Mao was responsible for far less of what happened in the 1949-1976 China than he is given credit for, although I would be more willing accept that he had indirect responsibility for the deaths of the GPCR. It seems quite clear that he started it and, to a significant extent, directed it. It's just that I've noticed the anti-Mao drive has taken on a certain fervor, both in the West and in China. I understand that tainting the image of Mao is an important element in the battle between the pro-capitalist leadership and those who benefit from their policies and the remaining Maoists and other radicals within and without the Communist Party of China (CPC). Mao serves as a symbol for both sides in that struggle. However, it's a bit of a red herring, if you'll pardon the obvious pun. For most of the history of the People's Republic, Mao was little more than a proxy emperor, with mostly ceremonial duties, and the ability to give overall direction to policy, sometimes that meant just naming things -- like using the name "communes" for the feudal domains in the countryside after 1958. The actual executive power in government mostly rested with the prime minister, the state council, and the bureaucracy, not with Mao. Mao didn't know what was going on most of the time. In fact, the effort to create the proper image for Mao to see was so intense (such as prettying up the villages and towns before Mao visited, fudging the statistics Mao was presented with, etc.) that it is dubious that Mao ever really understood the China he "governed." In that context, it would make no more sense to blame Mao directly for deaths that occurred in the GPCR (or the Great Leap Forward, where famine took a large number of lives) than to blame G. W. Bush for the killings of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan or those who died in New Orleans after Katrina. On the other hand, it's probably better to blame the emperor (or the imperial president) than to just let the atrocities slide, as if no one was to blame.

Ironically, I've been attacked by a number of people on the Left for the argument I make in Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision that the CPC implemented feudal social relations during the period from 1958 until the reform process began the transition to capitalism in the 1980s. A lot of these people, like Bob Pollen at UMass, seem to view me as a co-conspirator in the anti-Mao movement and don't even listen to my argument. Such is life, I guess.