Malcolm Turnbull praised brutal Chinese dictator Mao Zedong as his country's 'greatest leader' despite his slaughter of millions.

The former Australian prime minister said Mao's extreme communist writings, which justified the deaths of up to 70 million people, 'belong to everyone'.

He even compared the depot's words to those of American founding father Thomas Jefferson and famed Irish statesman Edmund Burke.

Malcolm Turnbull (pictured with current Chinese president Xi Jinping) praised brutal Chinese dictator Mao Zedong as his country's 'greatest leader'

'Chairman Mao is a great Chinese leader, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, but his writings belong to all of humanity,' he told the South China Morning Post.

'Everyone is entitled to quote, read Mao, read that history, quote it. Just like Americans are not the only people who can quote Thomas Jefferson, English men and women are not the only ones who can quote Edmund Burke.'

Chairman Mao won the Chinese Civil War in 1954, ushering in the country's current communist system, and began to radically remake the country.

His mass executions of enemies and wholesale slaughters of landlords saw up to 15 million people murdered or perished in forced labour camps.

Execution after a 'people's tribunal' in the land reform movement in Communist China Huang, probably a landowner paid for his 'crime' by being shot, taken in January 1953

Famines caused by his Great Leap Forward industrialisation policy killed tens of millions more. Mao's total body count runs as high as 70 million.

Adolf Hitler by contrast killed up to 17 million in the Holocaust and World War II and USSR despot Joseph Stalin up to 20 million.

Chairman Mao Zedong won the Chinese Civil War in 1954, ushering in the country's current communist system, and began to radically remake the country - along with the deaths of up to 70 million people

Mr Turnbull was responding to savage criticism he received from the Chinese state-owned press when he quoted Mao while prime minister.

'Modern China was founded in 1949 with these words: Zhongguo renmin zhanqilai – the Chinese people have stood up,' he said in December 2017.

'It was an assertion of sovereignty, it was an assertion of pride. And so we say: Aodaliya renmin zhanqilai – the Australian people stand up.'

China's press accused him of being 'full of lecturing aimed at China', and Mr Turnbull this week finally returned fire with both barrels.

'You are never going to win friends by insulting them and some of those personal attacks were utterly offensive and of a kind I have never seen used in Australian media,' he said.

'Rambunctious, independent as it may be, I have never seen criticism like that against a Chinese leader.'

In speaking of the Australian media, he claimed the influence of the News Corp press owned by Rupert Murdoch - which helped oust him - was waning.

Mr Turnbull said it was 'much easier' to deal with U.S. President Donald Trump than President Xi as the pair had a 'very good, fairly frank, blunt' relationship while he was still PM

He pointed to U.S. President Donald's Trump's massive Twitter platform, which he called 'liberating', as a sign that the mainstream media was in general less powerful.

Mr Tunbull contrasted the 'plain-speaking' Trump with the more 'complicated' style of Chinese president Xi Jinping and other Asian leaders.

He said it was 'much easier' to deal with Trump as the pair had a 'very good, fairly frank, blunt' relationship while he was still PM.

President Xi on the other hand was 'less free-flowing, less spontaneous, more carefully considered than the way Western leaders would talk to each other'.