Bear in mind that once upon a time, the communist leadership in China believed that they could teach rice farmers to refine iron and make alloy steel in grass fired clay kilns across the countryside; and that was how they were going to be able to keep those evil capitalist American navies out of their business.
Really?
I mean, I know bureaucrats are out of touch with reality, but this strains credulity.
It's not the bureaucrats' feat, but that of the revolutionaries. Bureaucrats wanted to maintain the status quo, revolutionaries wanted to change(read: impose their ideals of Utopia upon common folks) something, thus the tragedy.
One generation's revolutionary is the next generation's bureaucrat. That was a great part of the problem; Mao lived in an information bubble of his own making. He didn't trust the "intellectuals" but those whom he did trust were no more worthy of such faith, and tended to be less informed upon the subjects for which they were expected to advise than the intellectuals who proceeded them. Like anyone else, they were just trying to maintain the little fiefdoms that they had built up during the revolutionary period, even if that required deceiving the monarch in order to maintain political favor.