The role of democracy is to make government responsible to its constituents rather than to the rulers: democracy was founded on the idea that the monarchy fucking sucks and wealth/power should be better distributed.

China’s government is still accountable to its constituents, just in a different way than the US. Instead of winning and losing elections, getting increased or reduced responsibilities (promotion and demotion) is the primary way of managing accountability. The primary failure mode of China’s government is rampant corruption that decouples the promotion/demotion mechanism from actual constituent well-being, which is why stopping that is the platform that Xi Jinping rose to power on.

People always talk about civil liberties in China, but frankly Asian culture is notoriously conservative. LGBT rights are still an active topic across East and Southeast Asia (and indeed even in the US). Religious freedoms are just… not really a big concern when most of your population isn’t religious. Freedom of speech exists up until they begin calling for government reform/replacement: protests are a dominant form of expressing displeasure to local and municipal governments (the Jasic workers protest was quelled, but the company was punished by government policy that fucked their short-term growth prospects), and can even influence national politics (see the protests against COVID-19 lockdowns and the resultant opening of policy on COVID-19). The War On Terror rears it’s head in ugly ways, but all indigenous minorities get handled with affirmative action policies that encourage economic independence.

Getting over the great firewall is fairly trivial in practice, particularly for the young and tech savvy. The prevalence of studying (4.4 million students) and travel abroad (who the fuck knows) makes it even more trivial to learn and spread news from other perspectives. Activism is prosecuted a fair chunk more, but it’s not like activists in the West are given carte blanche either.

Is it less progressive than urban West Coast/Northeast US? Absolutely. Is the government as accountable as in democracies like the Nordic states or Switzerland? Absolutely not. Then again, you wouldn’t expect it to be. Chinese culture is far closer to that of right-wing America (without the bible thumping and gun toting lol) than it is to that of left-wing America, nevermind left-wing Europe.