You cannot speak about China currently without speaking of China historically, both within the last two centuries and in ancient history. The truth is after Mao died China slowly reverted into their natural state. An authoritarian empire spanning across the entire mainland. The CCP deserves credit where they were capable of casting off mao's retardation and embracing economic pragmatism, as for their economic growth in the century and a half before Mao took power was an unrelenting shit show of the qing being utterly incapable of modernizing and dealing with the threat of European empires, said empires running rampant in the region enforcing whatever they will (the opium war for example), and nightmarish internal instability. I would say the qing died a death of a thousand cuts but really it was like an elephant getting hacked to death with a machete. They sustained many injuries that would be fatal to anything else but eventually it did them in.
The KMT were marginally better, the corruption and incompetence was so baffling that I had to make sure it wasn't CCP propaganda, after the Japanese invaded China was thrown into another round of absolute chaos. (it should be noted Japan was the anti China, they recognized the threat of the Western empires and immediately began modernizing which they had done successfully). Truthfully the only reason I give the KMT the time of day is because of A they were able to function fine in Taiwan after a generation of totalitarianism and B just how horrifying Mao was.
Just having a stable government without foreign invasion or apocalyptic internal crisis is really what China needed, and the CCP provided that.
Regardless if the KMT or CCP won would mean the same, China would eventually industrialize and become a player on the world stage.
When you get down to it though I would say the CCP is functionally a revival of the Chinese school of legalism. If you don't know what that is imagine a cartoonishly totalitarian philosophy from the dark ages which feels like something derived from stalinism, i recommended going down a rabbit hole on that topic to get an understanding of the Chinese and what they consider authoritarianism to be. Things like the one child policy or social credit score is something that is abhorrent when you get down to it but acceptable to them.
As for things like their collosal high speed rail network it should be noted historically China has always been big on empire spanning infrastructure (take their ancient canal network for example). It should also be noted China loves these projects so they can inject massive amounts of money into their economy.
Ive seen people lament the defeat of the KMT but I believe had they won we likely would have had a similar creature to what we have currently, just different timetables for them getting their shit together, industrializing, and then becoming the global sweat shop. The truth is what we see now is the insect hive with a red coat of paint.
A word about the social credit score, censorship, demographic replacement, and one child policy. The West for a while had been trying to achieve a diet version of the aforementioned through persuasion instead of the authoritarian cudgel, usually side stepping through private enterprise. Recently in the last ten years this has collapsed and the cudgel has had to be used more against dissenters. Say the wrong thing and you lose your job, be it online or if someone just happened to have a camera even if the affront was years ago. Censorship was largely outsourced to the media and big tech, in China demographic replacement is used against undesirable ethnic groups like in tibet where an obscene amount of Chinese were planted there, in the West it's used against their own native populace through imported goblins and orcs, for China the forced one child policy is far more brutal than the campaign of pricing westerners out of being able to start a family and keep an acceptable standard of living instead going back to replacement by importing hordes of goblins who are content to live in impoverished squalor. It's twisted how close we have degenerated to them in a diet version of their insect reality dazzled with a facade as everything continues to get worse
