I've been playing EU5, reading some history and so on here and it's really hard to imagine what famine and mass death from it is like considering how food is pretty much instantly available to me at all times.

My closest connection was a few generations from me when I knew rural farm folks who had some memory, or influence of the Great Depression in the US. They were very particular about food, eating everything you took, and to them their idea of a delicacy was something that to me was very run of the mill.

I often wonder what the impact on culture is when in the extreme cases of famine so many die, so many watch others die and so on ...

The CCP is to blame for this atrocity, despite the generic “Chinese” title. Taiwan never had this. But similar things happened in other Communist countries, killing millions.