It's been a common saying for a long time that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and a tyrannical dictatorship the worst. Democracy exists primarily to avoid the latter, not that it's better than the former.

Neither China nor the UAE can be said to have a purely benevolent dictatorship but it's not purely tyrannical either. So not surprisingly they're better than democracies in some aspects and worse in others.