The west managed a massive decline in population growth without such draconian policies, and the west was popping out 6-10 babies on the regular till very recently. Also, the reason people were starving, and struggled to find work, wasn’t because the proletariat was doing something wrong, it was because the elites horribly mismanaged the country’s agriculture, despite the prols, who are supposed to be the dictators, telling the elite exactly why they didn’t do things that way, and that this would destroy their crops. They couldn’t keep up with the pace of jobs requirements because they forced a broad move to urbanized industrialization, then poorly planned that transition, and it took over 20 years to course correct, because they refused admit they didn’t know what they were doing. A broad re-planning of this only came after Mao died, which lead to the arrest of the “Gang of Four”, and a following liberalization of access to information, allowance of academic freedoms, and restructuring of schemes to move workers to an industrial economy.