During a public-health crisis, governments in the United States and the rest of the world are forced to consider measures—such as requiring health checks, limiting movement, and instituting quarantines—that infringe on individual liberties. The crisis now unfolding in China raises an uncomfortable question: Are authoritarian governments better equipped than democracies to meet the challenge of an epidemic?

Read: How the coronavirus revealed authoritarianism’s fatal flaw

A decade into a global backlash against liberal democracy, that question is urgent. Aspiring autocrats, from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, cherry-pick from a menu of repressive tactics and technologies—from building surveillance systems to banning independent media outlets—to exert control and retain power. The “China model” is alluring to democracy’s critics, for whom China’s firm handling of the COVID-19 outbreak looks like another proof point for authoritarianism.

Yet good public-health practice doesn’t just require control. It also requires transparency, public trust, and collaboration—habits of mind that allow free societies to better respond to pandemics. Democracies’ ability to cope with COVID-19 will soon be tested; after a proliferation of cases in South Korea, Japan, and Italy in recent days, officials are weighing how to respond. But citizens of democratic nations can reasonably expect a higher level of candor and accountability from their governments.

American citizens, for example, can count on the objectivity and accuracy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose weekly morbidity and mortality report has been a fixture of critical communication between the government and the public in one form or another since the late 1800s. Reliable reporting enables epidemiologists to predict a disease’s trajectory, researchers to develop treatments and vaccines, responders to trace transmission, and the public to protect itself.

In contrast, China actively hid the 2003 SARS outbreak from the international community, and, especially in the initial stages of COVID-19, it appears to have done so again. Local authorities deliberately suppressed early reports of the unknown virus, missing an early window responders had to stop the infectious disease before it spread. Although researchers released the virus’s genetic sequence in record time, local officials underreported cases, downplayed the risk of human-to-human transmission, and detained doctors who discussed the disease.

When one of those doctors, Li Wenliang, tried to warn friends on the social-media service WeChat, he was summoned before authorities and required to disavow his concerns. He later died of complications from COVID-19. When asked during a BBC interview about Li’s treatment, the Chinese diplomat Liu Ziaoming shrugged it off as the handiwork of overzealous local officials. But that is precisely the point. China’s cover-up of the virus was not the result of a system malfunction. In an authoritarian state, cover-ups happen by design. The language of authoritarianism—the language of fear and force—is one that every low-ranked apparatchik from Pripyat to Wuhan understands when acting on his or her own initiative to bury bad news.