Besides, Internet, being as wide open to anonymity as it is, simply never would never have been developed in a country like China, it would be deemed too dangerous. They may compete these days in electronics, but it doesn't mean they can compete in everything. Totalitarian society is always rotten in one way or another, and it manifests in all its output, including business, science, technology and culture. I'm saying this as a person born in the USSR.
The US started a game of Civilization on easy mode.
Incidentally, this is precisely where your Civilization analogy goes wrong: the real newly formed states have way more powerful centrifugal factors than those embedded into mechanics of the game.
Sure, a measure of freedom is necessary to allow an economy to grow, but not nearly as much freedom as people enjoy in the USA. China is a case-in-point: their economy has rapidly expanded as the communist party has started to understand how far a bit of economic freedom goes. For all the freedoms people have in Japan, China managed to unseat Japan as the world's second-largest economy, and is on track to become the world's largest economy within our lifetimes.
China is not the USSR. China has embraced certain capitalist approaches -- like capital markets. The Chinese have figured out what the USSR never fully grasped: economic freedom is not the same thing as political freedom. The USSR tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy, but the Chinese have figured out that it is good enough to have a party member seated on the board of directors.
I would argue that the basic design of the Internet is the most efficient way to build a large-scale, general-purpose computer network; this is why it has subsumed or is in the process of subsuming every other system. Had China been the world's largest economy at the time I think they would have developed the Internet too -- maybe they would have tried to build some kind of censorship in, but they would have quickly discovered that it is just more efficient to censor at the edges (I think they are already aware of this fact, given the amount of censorship they require from social media websites and the last-resort role the Great Firewall plays; there is also the general tolerance of businesses using VPNs to avoid the Great Firewall).
For what it's worth, there is innovation coming out of China, and it is happening at an increasing pace as the Chinese economy grows. The freedom to criticize your government or to organize a protest movement is not really necessary for technical innovation.