The reality is that the CCP is a dynamic organization, which has the ability to react to new situations and effect new goals in creative ways, in some ways better than Western liberal democracy. "Dictatorship" rhetoric obscures that reality and encourages lazy thinking about liberalism reigning triumphant at the end of history.
In recent times, its response to the COVID outbreak is a good example. It's the only "continental" country which has successfully contained COVID, by leveraging its ability to put the whole of China on a wartime footing. That's despite the disease originating in China; them being the first government to have to figure out an approach, with limited biological knowledge of the disease; and initial missteps that led to a full scale disaster in a major city. Today, amazingly, the CCP has more domestic support than it did a year ago, having received credit for defeating COVID.
Other examples of successes: pioneering a way for a government to harness the Internet to increase its own power; the subjugation of rebellious regions (which, by contrast, many countries including the USSR failed at) while mitigating international fallout; wresting control of the South China Sea from competitor states.
Its richness vs SK's and TW's is an interesting discussion, and Maoism set mainland China back decades. But mainland China was a poorer area in 1920 than either SK or TW, with a more rural and isolated population, and SK and TW avoided the worst of WW2 and the ravages of the Chinese Civil War while reaping the benefits of being maritime states and allied to rich countries. A better comparison would be to India, which is a country with a similarly large landmass, massive rural peasant populations, and isolated inland villages. In 1950, it had a similar GDP per capita as China, but today China's GDP per capita is almost 4x that of India. (SK and TW, by contrast, started at a ~50% higher GDP per capita in 1950 than either, though they're now both ~200% higher per capita). It's actually pretty shocking that India did so badly for half a century, considering how badly China mucked things up for three decades.
