[thaumasiotes]

> in a dictatorship people do not have economic freedom or the incentives to truly do the hard work necessary to build this industries.

At the end of the Ming dynasty, there was a commercial family dominating the sea trade out of the southern coast. When the Qing took power, they told the family patriarch he could keep everything, as long as he was willing to swear loyalty to the new dynasty. He immediately did so.

His son, however, issued a rousing formal denunciation of his father, questioning how anyone whose oath to the Ming had been sincere could betray them at the drop of a hat like that. It was so persuasive that it convinced the Manchus, who threw the patriarch in prison -- devolving control of the whole enterprise onto the Ming-loyalist son. He went into open rebellion, took his hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen to Taiwan, and waged war on the Qing for decades. His rebellion was only ended when the Qing took the dramatic step of fully evacuating the coastline to prevent anyone from supporting him from the mainland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koxinga

Dictatorships allow quite a bit of freedom.