Here’s Will Hutton, writing in The Guardian:

“Nobody wants to be an apologist for Mao. Even the Communist party, five years after his death, delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution meant that he had been 30% wrong. Mao was undoubtedly responsible for monstrous crimes, but…”

Ah, as I’m not the first to observe, there’s always that ‘but’.