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That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.
Left wing authoritarianism is still authoritarianism. Further, modern China isn't particularly communist, and hasn't been since at least the 80s. It's more like Fascism With Chinese Characteristics. Openly fascist countries like Nazi Germany also pretended to be nominally democratic by carrying around the corpse of the Reichstag, but the illusion fooled nobody.
The corrupt democracies are mostly the ones that have shaky democratic fundamentals, i.e. ones that are either hybrid regimes, or the ones that wobble in and out of coups.
Or in other words, it's national socialism. Germany used to be national socialist in the '30s, then all their men got killed in the war they started, now they're just socialist.
I think that National Socialism is one of the systems of government that can emerge when you have a relative balance of male and female interests in a nation, and that nation is significantly overpopulated relative to its economic opportunity at the time. Places that have no need of men are socialist to the point of complete paralysis (the West), places that have no use for women are extremely militaristic (Afghanistan is the best example, but the middle and near east are all like this) or busy fighting civil wars (Africa).
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I'll grant that, but either way communism seems to be unique in the amount of scars it leaves on a country, and should be treated uniquely, rather than to make a general point about authoritarianism.
That's starting to sound like any democracy that's not performing well is not a true democracy.
Communism is a uniquely bad economic system, but it also has the authoritarianism or totalitarianism which is part of what makes it terrible. The economic systems aren't close, but the political control of the leaders are, and thus a comparison can be made.
Well yes, a democracy that gets couped into a dictatorship is... no longer a true democracy. Corruption isn't solved overnight, so if a country oscillates between democracy and dictatorship every decade then it's probably going to be more corrupt than a nation that's been democratic for multiple decades or centuries.
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