All states are authoritarian and China proved you cannot reach communism without a socialist state in a transitory period. So all possible paths to the next step of socioeconomic evolution will be authoritarian.

Authoritarianism isn't a bad thing, it's what makes a state, a state.

'Oh sure, the CIA got caught doing and admitted to selling weapons to Iran and used the money to buy drugs from the contras in attempts to destabilize both regions, and sure they openly supported Al Qaeda financially and with training in order to destabilize the region, and sure there are literally hundreds of thousands of declassified files that tie the CIA to almost every terrorist organization in the world which would assign the majority of violent deaths since WWII solely to the US government which has been, according it its own intelligence agency, the single greatest contributor to world instability in world history, having caused far more damage than all empires and all other countries that you could ever possibly list... but you know what, they definitely wouldn't train and arm Turkish nationals to commit terror attacks across western China resulting in a nationwide crackdown that the US government would later allege is a genocide despite having plenty of evidence that it simply isn't; and you know they would never arm and train 'protestors' who violently take over several blocks of beijing causing at least twenty deaths before riot police and the army could step in and then take a photo out of context and use it as some kind of symbolic ideological attack on how awful the Chinese government is. They're just not capable of that.' - The average Lemmy liberal.