In short, the countries you mention all faced a similar policy dilemma: my country is impoverished—and others are prosperous and developed. How does my country get from here to there as fast as possible? And the successful answer for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan was to embark on decades of iterative industrial policies where government guided (or dictated) private firms into niches within the international market to which they could derive competitive advantage. Subsidies, tariffs, technology transfers were all tools those governmens leveraged to help firms get from “how do we even make this?” to “how do we make it better than America?” to “what next?”. Academics later dubbed this model the “Developmental State”(see Stephen Haggard’s book of the same name).

Japan was the vanguard of developmental state model, though export dominance came late in the game. Taking from Chalmers Johnson’s account on the “Japanese Miracle,” Japan’s reindustrialization from 1945-1955 relied on a robust domestic market. The cars and semiconductor exports that stressed U.S. workers in the 1980s were the fruition of decades of protectionism and managed public/private investment. Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) worked hand-in-glove with private firms to drive domestic growth and modernization. Johnson brings out another important factor for the East Asian economic stories—the post-war era was unique for having such a permissive international free market with stable currency exchange rates thanks to U.S. led international institutions.

South Korea and Taiwan are the best examples in your question of the export-first model. These small states did not have the vast domestic markets to support capital intensive industries without their respective governments support and an international free market to sell to. South Korea and Taiwan’s governments operated as shrewd guides to their nascent domestic industries.

China is an ironic case where less government drove more growth. The rock bottom living standards in mainland China during Mao’s rule were at stark contrast with the prosperity of Hong Kong or Taiwan in the mid-1970s. Maoist socialism was facing a crisis of legitimacy. Under Deng Xiaoping from 1978-1992, China got over its ideological aversion to free-markets and private firms. China opened up to foreign firms that could leverage China’s vast surplus of low-skill domestic labor. This resulted in an increase in foreign direct investment in China’s manufacturing capacity and a virtuous cycle of increasing industrial complexity. It remains to be seen if China can become an originator of some high end manufacturing rather than an assembler. Think IPhone—final assembly in China—but sourced globally and designed by a U.S. firm.

While we focus on seeing more “made in China” stickers, the most important result of China’s economic liberalization was the end of food insecurity. One of the greatest shifts in the scale of human well being was the government removing itself from the rural economy, allowing farmers to reengage in commerce. Small shops, restaurants, and local markets soon followed. You certainly see industrial policy at work in China, most famously in the steel industry, but the more consequential story of China’s development was where the government receded rather than those instances where the government interceded.

Southeast Asian nations also engaged in industrial policy and echoed aspects of the developmental state with mixed results. In Perkin’s assessment, he attributes the relative decentralized nature of some post-colonial Southeast Asian states with their less robust ability to shape domestic industries into fearsome international competitors.

And when it comes to “Other countries” not going the export route, as my friends all say, “there’s always communism.” Command economies looked pretty good at certain phases from 1945-1991. North Korea was more developed than the South until the 1970s. The Soviet Union appeared robust and prosperous to outsiders when they were going to space first and promising everyone housing.

Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) was a popular development model (now not so much). ISI has similarities to the Developmental State model, so listen carefully. Both will employ tariffs and subsidies to protect domestic industry. Both may involve subsidies or public investment. Both have a lot of public/private collusion. The difference comes in the implementation. ISI typically ends up looking like India, protective tariffs are too high to create competition, resulting in domestic substitutes of low quality, which then never have a chance of becoming internationally competitive. Broken markets and high government debt are the result. A developmental state will use tariffs narrowly for select industries in early development, then remove the guardrails over time. Developmental states have better differentiation between public and private entities. Though the public/private relationship in a developmental state would still be way too close for the comfort of the average American of any political brand. By the 1990’s ISI had a pretty bad track record for domestic economic outcomes.

As a last note, the leadership in the countries that followed aspects of Japan’s growth model were being pragmatic and comparing what worked amongst nations. Especially by the 1980s, there was plenty of data on how the market economies had fared in the world. That ability for national leaders to look around and match successful policies to their own domestic circumstances made a huge difference in the lives of their citizens.

Sources for this answer East Asian Development by Dwight Perkins MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson From Divergence to Convergence: Reevaluating the History Behind China’s Economic Boom by Loren Brandt, Debin Ma, and Thomas G. Rawski