There are substantial disputes, because neither Stalin nor Mao were cheerful about people inquiring into the issue. It's also debatable as to just how many of the deaths were attributable to purposeful intention, and how many to starvation due to incompetence and a political zeal for impractical ideas about agriculture (see, for example Stalin's support for Lysenko).

To take Mao as an example, he gets a bee in his bonnet that peasants should all eat together, and that the very idea of cooking your own food for your own family is some kind of bourgeois landlordism. He sends cadres into villages who actually confiscate cooking and eating utensils, along with every scrap of food. People panic, food production plummets, and a lot of people starve.

Is this intentional murder?

The same question is asked about Stalin's famines. You'll find Anne Applebaum making a persuasive case for "yes, Stalin really meant this to happen-- famine was an intentional punishment for political enemies, real or perceived". But Stephen Kotkin sees that matter differently, essentially that famine was more the result of a disastrously misguided collectivization process than an intentional strategy of mass starvation.

Its clear that we can ascribe many deaths to intentional murder-- but there's a large category of deaths that are going to be legitimately characterized differently by different people. Whatever the case, what you can say for certain is: both men ruled with knowing brutality. They killed, and they terrorized, and they intended to do so. They also would seem to have killed a lot of people through indifference and an ideological approach to agriculture that resulted in famine.

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Sources:

Kotkin & Applebaum are both working with the latest documents coming out of opened Soviet era archives, and come to somewhat different conclusions. Neither is wrong, reading the two source together you'll get a flavor for the open issues.

Red Famine -- Anne Applebaum

Waiting for Hitler -- Stephen Kotkin

Mao's Great Famine -- Frank Dikotter

- Dikotter is looking here specifically at the famine, as distinct from the Cultural Revolution and other acts of revolutionary violence. He's definitely in the "Mao was an intentional killer camp"

During Mao's reign, he was considered a God. Mao could do NOTHING wrong in the eyes of his followers, and he made sure to keep it that way. Whenever one of his policies went awry, it was blamed on the lower level officials not implimenting it correctly, or them not enforcing it at all/too much/too little.

There was a fervor surrounding Mao so that any tragedy or mass murder of people was seen as a mistake not in his policy, but of everyone under him.

So, while denying all of the deaths would not necessarily be communist or anti-communist propaganda, blaming Mao himself for the deaths would be considered anti-communist and anti-Mao propaganda. Any sort of criticism of Mao, no matter how small, would be punished.

He is still worshipped today by many Chinese families, and so while the atrocities and deaths may be acknowledged or disputed, they often are not attributed to Mao himself in mainland China.

Sources:

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang. A family history of three generations under Mao's rule.