Undoubtedly when Mao drove the Kuomintang out of the Mainland, there were people who "really fail[ed] to see how one could believe it rational" to fear that within a decade Mao would starve to death ten times as many innocent people as the Kuomintang had ever murdered, particularly since such a large democide had never happened before in history. Then, it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Undoubtedly when Mao drove the Kuomintang out of the Mainland, there were people who "really fail[ed] to see how one could believe it rational" to fear that within a decade Mao would starve to death ten times as many innocent people as the Kuomintang had ever murdered, particularly since such a large democide had never happened before in history. Then, it happened.