As I said, the bottom line for the world order seems to be deployment of force. Right now the most relevant force paradigms as far as I can tell are mass information control and bio-warfare (nuclear has largely been tabled.) The authoritarianism has given China an advantage in terms of controlling information and infection and that has been strongly proven out.
If you think Covid was a lab escaped bio weapon then prove it or get off this site.
But regardless of what caused it, if you look at the effects, military strategists almost have to treat it as the Hiroshima of bio-warfare. Because it proves that such a thing is both extremely effective and also very hard to prove one way or the other.
Authoritarianism by itself doesn't explain the extreme lockdowns in China. But if the Chinese military sees Wuhan as evidence of the effectiveness of bioweapons and the start of an era, then the lockdowns can be seen as key to effectively defending against (or using) them. So tight pandemic response is now a core national security issue,
Another way to interpret all of it is as overall strengthening "society's immune response" to pandemics and so you could see that as a good thing in perverse way.
But that doesn't really change the military interpretation or brutal paradigm of global power that we seem to be stuck in.