Professor Singer is, indeed, being too pessimistic here.



In the first place human nature is deeply conditioned by security or the lack thereof, and this is a sociological commonplace which is frankly reactionary to deny (cf Stephen Pinker on the long-term historical decline of interpersonal violence).



Also, and again I would have thought Prof. Singer would have noted this too in view of his other articles, in spite of all their other failings and even in spite of atrocities like the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward famine, old fashioned Communist regimes generally achieved dramatic net increases in life expectancy and human development indicators.



(Cf the 1943 Bengal Famine under British rule BTW, we aren't blameless in the West even when set against some of the worst atrocities of Communism, and with less success in areas like public health in poor countries that we have dominated to compensate for it.)



Thirdly, the focus under old-style Communism was generally infrastructural and developmental in a pragmatic way that was appropriate to countries at a low level of industrial development -- dams, steel mills, tractor factories etc -- and in building up infrastructure, which is often developed under state direction even in the West, they were usually successful in building a foundation for a later, more sophisticated and liberal type of economy that might not have had a foundation otherwise.



Fourthly, I might add that economic growth under Mao was often quite rapid (as even more so under Stalin), it was just that in China growth was occurring from such a low base it formed the toe of an exponential curve, a period during which it doesn't look like there is anything happening compared to what came later.



As such, the Chinese CP doesn't make as as big a distinction between the Mao and the Deng eras as Westerners do.



Naturally it suits CCP's quest for continuing legitimacy not to repudiate Mao's legacy, in the same way that it also suits Vladimir Putin, politically, to blow on the coals of Soviet nostalgia -- but in fact the case for not throwing out a developmental baby with the bathwater of old-style Communism's worst blunders and excesses is stronger than generally realised.