I don't think so.
I think that most people take a single historical example (USSR) and at a certain paranoid era and extrapolate it to every kind of totalitarian or vaguely similar society -- as if its some inevitable byproduct.
An authoritative society can just as easily be quite hands off with sciences (as long as they don't meddle in politics, e.g. not so with social sciences for example).
In fact, post-Mao China has already diverted a lot from USSR (and of course of USSRs under-productivity).
They already have pragmatic (if authoritarian) political goals and approaches, and could not care less what Mao said or what the "laws of historical materialism" are, etc -- whereas early communist elites were hang up on such things.
One added difference between USSR then and China now (besides the obvious huge change in productivity and wealth) is that Chinese elites also know about Lysenkoism and its results.