> They changed course and put the land into collectives and it is still in collectives today so the famine cannot be blamed on collectives.

Painting it as if Mao era collectives are the same as the state quotas that exist today is highly misleading. The HRS was 1979:

"The household responsibility system replaced collective farming." [1]

Broadly speaking, the collectives can and should be blamed for the famine, just as in the Ukraine. Getting into the weeds on the specific mechanisms is fine, but using it to undermine the broader lesson is apologetics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_responsibility_syste...