The Covid-19 crisis has become the latest front in the escalating clash of ideologies that has become a central feature of geopolitics in recent years. Representing authoritarianism is China, which has touted the success of its aggressive lockdown strategy in curbing the coronavirus’s spread. Representing democracy are a broad array of countries, some of which have responded far worse than others. So, which political system is better suited to managing crises?

The notion that authoritarian regimes have an advantage may be alluring. Whereas in democracies, such as the United States, people may misunderstand their freedom and resist protective measures like mask-wearing, authoritarian regimes can easily impose and enforce rules that serve the public good. Moreover, some have argued that China benefits from the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on conformity and deference to authority, in contrast to Western democracies’ emphasis on individual autonomy and consent to authority.

China’s government has been attempting to reinforce these narratives, including by mocking the slow response in the US. And it’s true that a sudden strict lockdown like the one that contained the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan—the pandemic’s first epicentre—would be anathema to Americans. But when it comes to assessing political systems’ capacity to respond to crisis, this comparison misses the point.

For starters, democracies that uphold Confucian norms—such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—have managed the Covid-19 crisis at least as effectively as China. So have several democracies without a Confucian tradition, including Australia, Greece, New Zealand and Norway. In fact, among the countries whose performance during the crisis has been rated most highly, the majority are democracies.

What these top-ranked democracies have in common is that their leaders recognised the scale of the challenge, communicated credibly with their citizens and took timely action. Worse-performing countries, by contrast, were either caught largely off guard (Italy and Spain) or had leaders who knowingly delayed action (Brazil, the UK and the US).

To some extent, even the latter failure isn’t out of line with history: as the run-up to the two world wars shows, democracies have often been slow to recognise the threat of war. Yet, once they did, they always prevailed, thanks to a combination of determined action and public trust in government.

True, some democratic governments nowadays have largely lost the public’s trust and seem determined not to act. US President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro have both played down the severity of the virus and contradicted expert advice, while indulging their own narcissistic need to appear tough. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has displayed similar tendencies.

But this can hardly be regarded as a pitfall of democracy. After all, during the Covid-19 crisis, many heads of democratic governments have emerged as exemplars of enlightened leadership.

In New Zealand, 39-year-old Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has spoken frankly about the threat the virus poses, appealed to people’s sense of shared responsibility and implemented science-based measures.  The spread of the virus was contained by early April, and fewer than 25 new cases have been detected so far this month.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s calm, transparent and credible communication style has contributed to a response that has kept the fatality rate low. Resolute and timely action taken by Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen, Norway’s Erna Solberg, Iceland’s Katrin Jakobsdottir and Finland’s Sanna Marin have produced similarly impressive results, without veering from democratic principles.

These leaders had the trust of their citizens. (One might argue that electing a woman leader—in some cases, a very young one—reflects a country’s political maturity and fundamental trust in the work of government.) And their responses deepened it.

Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes depend on propaganda and censorship to maintain a patina of legitimacy, making lack of trust in government practically inescapable. Why would one trust China’s Covid-19 figures, when it has been widely reported that local authorities’ initial response to the outbreak was marked by suppression of information?

This is far from China’s first coverup. During the 2003 SARS outbreak, a physician had to become a whistleblower before the government told the truth about the epidemic. Some informed observers don’t even believe China’s official GDP statistics. In any case, a new wave of Covid-19 infections in China now seems to be emerging.

There’s also good reason to believe that the outbreaks in Iran and Russia are far more serious than has been reported. Following a series of official missteps—including the Kremlin’s initial refusing to take the crisis seriously—Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity plunged to its lowest level in his 20 years in power.

In comparing countries’ performance during the Covid-19 crisis, there are also relevant factors that have nothing to do with political systems. Countries that have experienced infectious-disease outbreaks in the recent past—such as China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—benefit from institutional knowledge.

But even here, with the admittedly remarkable exception of Vietnam, the democracies seem to have learned the lessons of past outbreaks better. South Korea’s experience in 2012 with Middle East respiratory syndrome directly shaped its Covid-19 response, which emphasised large-scale testing. China, by contrast, repeated its mistake from the SARS epidemic, by initially attempting to engineer a cover-up.

The problem isn’t that China didn’t learn its lesson; the problem is that it couldn’t. And that is the point. In a democracy, a crisis is a political test: a leader must retain or strengthen the public’s trust, or risk being voted out in the next election. But in an autocracy, a crisis is a threat to the regime’s legitimacy—indeed, its survival.

With such high stakes, a cover-up will always seem like the safest bet. To expect such a government to respond differently, as Trump has demanded of the Chinese, may be tantamount to calling for regime change.

Facebook’s plans to launch a global cryptocurrency have been met with a swift and justifiably wary reaction from regulators around the world. The US Congress’s House Financial Services Committee wrote an open letter to Facebook calling for a halt to further development of Libra until US lawmakers have had more time to consider its implications, while regulators in the UK said that the proposal needs ‘deep thought and detail’. In Australia, Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe expressed scepticism, highlighting the many regulatory issues which need to be addressed.

Critics have expressed concern about the potential for a globally successful Libra currency to effectively transfer vast amounts of power over everything from monetary policy to the application of laws and sanctions away from national institutions to unelected multinational corporations, and that this risks eroding core principles of democracy and national sovereignty.

These are important points. But there’s another, less obvious but perhaps equally significant, way in which Libra could be used—in fact, could be actively weaponised—against democratic rights, by undermining the ability to protest.

Internet shutdowns are becoming an increasingly common tactic for governments looking to quash protests and dissent around the world. In 2018, NGO Access Now documented 196 internet shutdowns in 25 countries, primarily in developing nations in Africa and Asia. In the past month alone, governments have partially or entirely shut down the internet in response to post-election protests in Mauritania, unrest and conflict in Myanmar, pro-democracy protests in Sudan and people protesting against lynchings and the death of a man in police custody in India.

Facebook has been working extremely hard to market Libra as a solution for the world’s unbanked and under-banked populations, ‘virtually all’ of whom live in developing countries according to World Bank research in 2017. Facebook also appears to be targeting users in developing economies who already have access to the traditional financial system but are seeking cheaper alternatives, particularly for international transfers and remittances.

Imagine, then, a situation in which Facebook gets everything it wants for Libra in a hypothetical developing nation. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people who previously had no access to financial services and kept all their money in cash start transacting in Libra instead. Libra becomes the dominant method of exchanging value among ordinary citizens, particularly people at the low end of the socioeconomic spectrum for whom Libra is more affordable than the traditional financial system.

Many people who haven’t had access to banks stop keeping their savings in cash, instead converting their life savings to Libra and storing it in Facebook’s Calibra digital wallet, where they believe it will be safer than under the bed. Others choose to move their money out of bank accounts and into Libra, perhaps because they don’t trust their own government or because their national currency is highly unstable. Small businesses, individual traders, even employees begin accepting Libra as their main form of payment. People start making and receiving small loans and other financial services in Libra. A grassroots economy begins to flourish built on the back of this digital currency.

And then some part of the community does something the government doesn’t approve of, like protesting to protect their rights, and the government shuts down the internet.

Internet shutdowns in the past have lasted for months at a time, notably in Cameroon in 2017. India leads the world for the most internet shutdowns, with 59 in the first half of 2019 alone. Almost half of India’s internet shutdowns are in the restive region of Jammu and Kashmir.

Protesters can last a long time without access to Facebook, but how long can they last without access to their own money? How long would they hold out, as they watch their neighbours’ businesses suffer and their elderly parents be cut off from their retirement savings? What comes first, democratic principles or the ability to pay your rent and buy food for your children?

The government would have plenty of time to wait the protesters out. It seems a reasonable assumption that governments, government services, the military and security agencies would continue to operate in their nation’s sovereign currency and be relatively unaffected by cutting off access to Libra. It might be an inconvenience to the nation’s wealthy and powerful, if they conduct some transactions in Libra. But they will probably have significant wealth stored in the traditional financial system, so they won’t be cut off completely.

If Facebook is right and it is the world’s poor and marginalised who have the most to gain from Libra, then it’s also the world’s poor and marginalised who are most at risk from losing access to it.  A highly successful Libra project would effectively hand governments a financial kill switch that they could flip with minimal damage to themselves, but with potentially devastating effects on those opposing them.

It’s important to grapple with the ways in which Libra has the potential to undermine the power of governments, but it’s also important to think about the ways in which an enterprising authoritarian government, or even a democratic one, might find ways to twist Libra to its advantage. Internet access is already being wielded as a weapon by governments seeking to silence dissent or crack down on their people. Fostering dependency among poorer and more vulnerable communities on a cryptocurrency would make that weapon all the more powerful.