Hey com. I don't have anything specific to "intellectuals being killed" it sounds like Black book of Communism trash though.

The long since debunked 100 million deaths of communism. This is so fallacious that even Chomsky debunked this and showed if you applied the Black Book of Communisms methodology to India you get 100 million indian dead in just 20 years. So the "criminal" indictment of communism as a failed system which is beyond the pale throughout the entire 20th century produced 100 million deaths in 70 years in multiplie countries whilst the liberal democratic capitalist country of India produced this figure in just 20 years

Like others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the "recording angels" attribute to "Communism" (whatever that is, but let us use the conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India's "political system of adversarial journalism and opposition," while in contrast, China's totalitarian regime suffered from "misinformation" that undercut a serious response, and there was "little political pressure" from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).

The example stands as a dramatic "criminal indictment" of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen's India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had "similarities that were quite striking" when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. "But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India" (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame," 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

:In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the "ideological predispositions" of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when "the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed," thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.

**Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist "experiment" since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the "colossal, wholly failed...experiment" of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone. The "criminal indictment" of the "democratic capitalist experiment" becomes harsher still if we turn to its effects after the fall of Communism: millions of corpses in Russia, to take one case, as Russia followed the confident prescription of the World Bank that "Countries that liberalise rapidly and extensively turn around more quickly [than those that do not]," returning to something like what it had been before World War I, a picture familiar throughout the "third world." **

-Chomsky, http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.html

Stéphane Courtois (the author of the Black Book Of Communism) was described by his co-authors as being "obsessed" with reaching the 100 million figure, including things like car accidents and deaths from old age and even Nazis and their collaborators if you can believe it. All of the co-authors of the Black Book of Communism have since distanced themselves from it

Communism, the falsifications of a " black book "

The assessment of the “ crimes of communism ” established by the French historian Stéphane Courtois in his “ Black Book ” sounds like an indictment. The author draws a scandalous parallel between communism and Nazism and invokes the idea of ​​a Nuremberg tribunal to try those responsible. It does not matter that the figures cited are manipulated, or even false, that several co-authors have dissociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois, many journalists, without having taken the trouble to read the book, have praised it dythirambique.

Le Monde Diplomatique, Communism, the falsifications of a " black book "https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.monde-diplomatique.fr%2F1997%2F12%2FPERRAULT%2F5097

https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1997/10/31/les-divisions-d-une-equipe-d-historiens-du-communisme_3811179_1819218.html

Whilst I'm sure there was excesses in the cultural revolution this is nothing compared to India (even if you combine every communist country combined and compare them all against India) a fully capitalist liberal, parliamentary "democracy". Wikipedia and especially English wikipedia is just anticommunist nonsense to prop up bourgeois thought and ideology to reproduce class society.

Great place to start, thanks.

For a whole overview of the period from a bunch of scholars, the Afterlives of Chinese Communism essay collection Verso and Made In China Journal put out together is very good.