I agree that authoritarian governments have more latitude than democracies. The CCP displaced up to two million people when it built the The Three Gorges Dam. There was no recourse. No ability to object. People who had lived on the land for generations were simply told to leave. Some were lucky to be given meagre government apartments to live in elsewhere, but that was it. It’s much easier to build large infrastructure projects when you don’t have to worry about pesky things like property laws, health and safety, and human rights.

If your argument is that authoritarianism will win over democracy in the long term, it’s an interesting debate. Most of human history was some form of authoritarianism. Some form of might makes right. There have been small democratic experiements in history (see Greece), but modern democracy is a relatively new experiment. I hope it succeeds, because I like it a lot more than the alternatives.