Properly define authoritarian before using it as a thought-terminating scare word, & you will come to the conclusion that it is simply used to conjure up stereotypical images about certain peoples & their governments.
How do I know this? Because it is so abstract as to be meaningless without further context, & the further context makes countries like China look like fully-realised communism compared to the coloniser states.
Contradictions & struggle increase under a socialist system; they do not evaporate overnight. It's not easy, & every Party that has led a socialist state is extremely aware that the struggle for communism gets even harder under socialism, because socialism needs to deal with resurgent bourgeois elements, provide for healthcare, establish & defend all the peoples rights (housing, work according to personal ability, healthy food, clean water).
Most importantly it needs to constantly try to get all the people involved in the political sphere with constant bottom-up appointments and elections for leadership and also deal with constant feedback from below and surveying/referenda. And unlike other systems, socialism involves self-criticism & the Party keeping each other honest, on the path, & meeting planning goals (or else you get Yugoslavia).
Anti-corruption must be an even stronger priority under socialism. The Xi era is markedly better for socialism than the era starting with Deng. The CPC has already been reshuffling & getting rid of corrupt actors/aspirant bourgeoisie in the military & in civilian sectors. The remants of capital in the form of Chinese billionaires live terrified lives for a good reason, & their assets are ultimately on-condition & used to sabotage them (by appropriating & investing in all-China development instead of letting them buy political power). This would not have happened if China's socialist revolution somehow just reverted to feudalism/early capitalism. Instead, maybe there would be a Brezhnev-like "maintenance era" of stagnation (that was a bit better than Khruschev but still bad, and did not correct the political damage done by the preceding one).
We would not see enormous developmental progress, very high civic engagement, low crime, & imcreasing arts-&-culture exports, & potential world-leader status, nor would we see favourable trade terms with other countries & "pay when you can" loans to those ravaged by colonialism, nor would we see unwillingness to engage in shared pillage exploits (ie. military alliances formed to harass poor nations). All of the above happening at the same time is an unfathomable contradiction in a capitalist country.
The evidence just does not show that the CPC are doing such a bad job cultivating socialism that an ultra-left civil war is necessary to course-correct for Deng. Moreover, another civil war in China is implicitly an endorsement of the imperial order, and I hope you aren't seriously suggesting the neocolonial capitalist slaver bloc ought to go on unopposed.
Marketing is for shit-for-brains, is the main problem here. The workers, once exposed to what socialism is in a correct form, become skeptical of exploitation, especially marketing.
Smartening up the deliberately-infantilised workers, who are kept ignorant & pliable on purpose, is the way. Or else you simply believe education is impossible just because education is trash in the "west".