What make you think that being under monarchy Europe would yield different result? China is a great example of being a communist state where people's life is getting better and better. Political stability is a key to economic growth.
China is only growing economically to the extent that it's relaxed its socialist, authoritarian policies. As soon as it reasserts them, all that growth will go away. The fact that people's lives are improving is not sufficient evidence that the government is benevolent.
There is only one thing that reliably predicts human behavior: incentives. The incentives of the communist party are much more weakly aligned with the welfare of their people than those in democratic countries. It's as simple as that.
I must be missing something, top reply in this post shows exactly opposite - there is no relaxation of authoritarian policies. They tighten freedoms to be stable.
Relative to say, the 1980s, China is less authoritarian. I'm not in any way excusing or diminishing their authoritarianness , btw. I find it truly frightening, and reprehensible. However, what i'm worried about is that they've found a way to thread the needle such that they may maintain most of their authoritarian surveillance state, while also getting solid economic growth.
In the past, in order to develop a modern economy, it's been necessary for authoritarian states to relax their grip substantially. China may have found a path forward that allows them to relax substantially less than in the past, and that deeply concerns me, because it may mean that the liberalizing effects of progress are muted in that part of the world - and eventually, maybe the rest.