There are so many quotable bits in this history of 3 generations of women from China, Wild Swans. This one, after the depredations of the Cultural Revolution visited on author and her family, I found particularly poignant:

My friends and I often talked about the West. By then I had come to the conclusion that it was a wonderful place. Paradoxically, the first people to put this idea into my head were Mao and his regime. For years, the things to which I was naturally inclined had been condemned as evils of the West: pretty clothes, flowers, books, entertainment, politeness, gentleness, spontaneity, mercy, kindness, liberty, aversion to cruelty and violence, love instead of 'class hatred,' respect for human lives, the desire to be left alone, professional competence.... As I sometime wondered to myself, how could anyone not desire the West?

.... I was struck less by the West's technological development and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty (my emphasis). To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China.... At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see ho tolerant another society could be (again, my emphasis). I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond,...

...and how much they relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred time more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.

I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value.