This is an interesting point. My wife is Chinese and she explained this to me: people like her grandfather are thankful for Mao while they acknowledge his failures. The reason is simple: before Mao there was a long period of Chaos, and before that the Qing dynasty was an extremely oppressive government. Without going into too many details, the peasants were being screwed for hundreds of years. Because of Mao's efforts China became a unified country. Sure, there were decades of terror and famine the severity of which are astonishing, but they were relatively brief historicaly speaking and the people were just happy that China was "theirs". Moreover, the government was stable enough that the people who came after Mao were able to improve things, which didn't always happen historically.

It's not a great comparison but a similar thing happened with the Ming dynasty. If I recall correctly, the Ming emperor was terribly brutal, but people were so thankful that it wasn't the mongolians that they didn't care.

The dead don't have living rooms or portraits to hang there. Nor do they have children, or grand children.

This is the same logic that is often heard in day to day life after corporate reorganisations "everyone now agrees that the redundancies were unfortunate but necessary."

Maybe it's a kind of large scale Stockholm syndrome. On the other hand, it was countryside Chinese vs City or intellectual Chinese (Han, specifically) so there isn't an ethnicity vs ethnicity aspect to it, which probably makes it less troublesome in people's minds.

Not just survivors! My girlfriend's friend (early 20s, born the USA, relatively Westernized) does too.