Even in China's authoritarian government, there are fractions among the CCP. There are even many debates and conflicts within the Polibureau itself. No one is forcing anyone to think in certain way. People always hold different ideas, but just some times when people try to act out some of their ideas that will jeapodize the government stability, then there will be trouble.
Authoritarianism does not apply in the fields of academical science and engineering, as there will not be any threats to the legitimacy of the government, so there is not restrain. There is no any evidence that can prove that there is correlation between innovations and the system of government. Remember USSR? They had much rigid authoritarian government system than China has right now, and yet during their regime there were many innovations in many fields from USSR.
But what happened to USSR now. When compared to US, a democracy, what is its position now even in terms of innovation? Don't get me wrong, I want China to succeed too as much as you do. China, recently has been inspiration to many a asian countries, and I hope it leads the way in this too. It can only good for the world when a country with 1.3 billion population succeed. But I just think it's little harder in authoritative states to lead in innovation but it's definitely not impossible. China has been first in many a things, it could be in this too.
My only problem with china is that it has been supporting a lot of authoritarian states like North Korea, Iran. It's not right to support a government that suppress people's voice, also in which average chinese has no say.