Authoritarian structures generally excel when you need a lot of people to do a lot of the same thing: responding to disasters in simple but effective ways, high volume manufacturing, grunt and infantry level military operations, and large infrastructure projects.
These are the areas where China leads the world. With the possible exception of the military, America and other Western democracies are downright horrible at these things. We can't build infrastructure, have lost much of our high volume manufacturing, and react to disasters with delay and bickering and population non-compliance.
Where they don't excel is creativity, invention, innovation, culture creation, and maximizing individual well being in peacetime. They're also more politically brittle because there is no graceful mechanism for non-violent political change.