I find your framing somewhat historically inaccurate. China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people. Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture that originated in Europe and spread to the former European colonies (including to Venezuela and Argentina) and post-WWII to the allies. Although China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy those remained foreign concepts and did not permeate Chinese culture.

So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.

Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.

Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.