> Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has more room to act in crisis.
I strongly disagree; the above is an old shibboleth of dictators and other anti-democrats. Mussolini promised to make the train runs on time.
Authoritarian governments are actually starkly limited by the individuals with power - by their ability, their vision, their own greed and interests, and their political limitations (authoritarian power structures are not democracies; the limits are not voters and law but other power bases). When those leaders are incapable, the country fails - rule of man, not rule of law and by the people. In a democracy, the pluralism in people and inputs creates great flexibility: This especially applies to vision, a reason market economies, which factor in the vision of all, work so much better than command economies, limited to the cognitive processing of a few; it's the reason why micromanaging CEOs fail while delegating and empowering ones are so much more successful. Democracies are much more innovative politically and economically.
More generally, when one person can't do it, in a democracy others can; either others in the broad power structure do it, or the people in power are replaced. IMHO, that exact problem explains the lack of dynamism in authoritarian government, and the reason by imperial China fell so far behind the 'West' - when the emperor failed to adapt, the country was stuck with him (and his progeny) for another century. In a democracy, he'd be gone within months or at worst a few years.
Finally, corruption is an enormous problem and impediment in non-democracies, a fact long-established in Chinese histories. (IIRC, in Chinese histories the standard model of the long-term political cycle is the ascendancy of a new power, then its decline due to corruption, then chaos, then it repeats.) Policy is not driven by serving the voters, a necessity in democracies, but by those in power serving themselves.
Finally, reality does not bear out the strong-man theory: Without question the best performing economies historically are liberal democracies. China remains - and many believe will remain without liberal democracy - a poor country compared with the liberal democracies. Everything the Chinese dictatorship does well economically, from monetary policy to market capitalism to universal education, are innovations of liberal democracies. The most economically successful parts of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, are liberal democracies (speaking very broadly about Hong Kong - the complexities there are out of scope in this comment).
(This is not a knock on the people of China. I dream of the day they will be set free to run their own lives - it's hard to imagine the innovation of a billion people set free with those incredible cultural resources at their disposal.)