Who gives a damn about political freedoms as long as life is good? In most democracies where voting is optional, the participation rate is dismal in good times. As long as the CPC is doing a good job managing the economy and enabling people's lifestyle to improve, who cares if you can directly elect the president or not?
Better than having the government overthrown like in Russia and having some drunkyard Yeltsin come into power and piss the economy down the drain. It's a good thing that China didn't follow the path of Russia.
Compare China nowadays with Russia, it's fortunate that China cracked down on that western supported movement 16 years ago which had zero mainstream support inside China, (for some reason, the western media still haven't given up on something that no-one cares about). Think about reason why China's GDP has increased by 5 times and Russia's GDP has declined by 4 times since then.
With Gorbachev, what do you see? reform this, reform that, country collapses. Followed by the Yeltsin led drunken decade of economic disaster, nose-diving living standards and rationing, and now finally back to dictatorship and economic stability with Putin.
China's economy accounted for 25% of the world's economic growth in the last two years and with sustained 9% yearly economic growth, living standards are fast rising with more mobile phones users than people in America, extremely rapid broadband internet expansion and consumerist culture. If China was crashed by internal problems in 1989, it would not become what it is now.