@OH
I believe that he was inspired to do the great leap forward by Stalin's 5 year plan. And I believe that the 5 year plan intentionally allowed people to starve. It became apparent early on that the collectivization was a failure and that productivity of agriculture decreased, for a variety of reasons. When that became clear, Stalin continued to export food stocks instead of feeding the agrarian peasants who grew the food, thus causing the massive scale of of the famine. That's basically intentional mass murder via famine. Another collectivization effort happened in the USSR in the 1940s on a smaller scale, and once again it caused a (smaller scale) famine.
So yes, I believe that in part Mao had to have known that this sort of rapid industrialization would cost quite a few lives. I think it's possible he didn't realize it would grow to the exact scale it did in China's case, since some of that was due to really stupid and counter productive efforts to increase crop yields which ended up backfiring. But the lesson and example of the 5 year plan was more than enough warning of the hazards of such a policy that in general I don't allow him the excuse of ignorance.
It's also worth mentioning the reasons for the necessity of rapid industrialization were just as much based on internal politics and ideology as they were on military concerns. The blueprint for a workers utopia via Marx assumes that industrialization has already occurred under the stage of capitalism. And at least in the USSR there was a good deal of Bolshevik contempt for the agrarian peasant class as backwards, reactionary, religious and just not conducive to the party's vision of a revolutionary and class conscious proletariat. Probably not a coincidence then that they were the main ones to starve.
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