Regardless many of the strategies these countries used are increasingly difficult for low income countries to do as these countries (China is the biggest example) themselves are protective of these industries, there's no push for globalizing and as factories got increasingly automated.
That's not to say that I believe governance isn't important but the one's history is important for governance itself.
Cost of housing in HK is going to be an embuggerance if they don't fix that, it may bifurcate into a more strong over/underclass imbalance. Taiwan is amazing but has thinner underpinnings now the US has demanded chip manufacturing moves to continental USA and the water supply issue is huge.
But your central point I agree with strongly: fix education, health, housing and provide at least some representation and you can do so much better than being a colonial outpost of somewhere else sucking value out.
Malaysia in particular instituted pretty harsh laws to make Chinese suppress their Chinese identity and also curtailed their economic potential by implementing in practice expropriation and barring the Chinese from certain sectors of the economy.
So it emerged not because of multiculturalism but because they were being virtually locked out of the Malaysian economy.
I’m not super familiar with Chinese history, but this jumped out at me. How were other countries jealous of Chinese people during the decade of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Famine, death, destruction, etc. Am I misunderstanding something?
Japan did not view Korea as a place to enrich for anyone's benefit but Japan. The same with their occupation of Taiwan.