The real utility of democracy isn't really the people getting a say, despite the propaganda on the side of the tin. The real utility of democracy is that it enables a mechanism for bloodless revolution, by essentially hosting them periodically instead of letting the pressures build up for years and decades until the whole thing explodes in a violent, civilization-damaging orgy of blood and destruction. It gives a mechanism for factions to win today, and know cleanly that they won, and the losing factions to know that they lost today, but there is no need to resort to active violence because they will have another chance in 2/4/6 years, and in the meantime, are best off using words rather than war. These are the key characteristics that needs to be kept intact. The people voting is merely the only mechanism that I am aware of that has the ability to accomplish these goals; it utilizes the sheer inertial mass of the entire populace as a guarantee of the next vote occurring and as a dampener on excessively excited governments. (For this, the propaganda that Democracy is all about the people getting a say is useful, because it makes the population more likely to get properly feisty if you try to take it from them.) Personally I think there are some other possibilities, though it isn't clear to me they can function under the Westphalian definition of countries and sovereignty.

Looking at China's past decade or so... I'm getting the sense that they're going to be on the usual authoritarian trajectory of countries that decide the democracy isn't for them. Initially it can work better, because democracies are always messy, especially superficially messy in the ways that elites find oh-so-distasteful. But the thing is, while democracies are always about the same level of messy, the authoritarian regimes build up a lot of stress in the system which they hide in various places until they can hide no more, and one day the whole thing simultaneously explodes and implodes and is, on the whole, a great deal more messy than the ever-so-distasteful democracy would have been. Is the messiness of democracy the fault of the governance mechanism, or a reflection of the underlying messiness that exists regardless?

Is democracy good as such? That's a question for personal values. Would democracy be better for China in the next, say, 20 years than its current path? Probably, by any metric you choose. For all of its disadvantages on a day-to-day basis, in a 21st century world democracy really does have some significant long-term advantages, regardless of your local ideology, as long as you like, say, being alive, not fighting civil wars, that sort of thing.