>you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean

Sure I can. There's obviously no one meaning of the term. The Democracy of the Greeks has very little to do with the Democracy of Rousseau, or the 21st century. The Chinese themselves consider their system democratic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism).

And you can make the case that a system that delivers the will of the people has a stronger claim to the term than a system that merely exhausts itself in staging democratic processes with no regards to outcomes.

This is funnily enough even happening within Western societies where people are branded pro or anti-democratic usually based on their affiliation. Laying exclusive ownership to the term is simply a rhetorical tool.