East Asia was an economic, scientific, and industrial leader for much longer than the West: several thousand years as opposed to about 300. In fact, it's likely that China would have undergone the Industrial Revolution around 1200 had it not been disadvantageously exposed to the "Steppe Highway"-- the reach extending from Hungary to Manchuria that made it relatively easy for nomads on horseback to terrorize agricultural or urban people. Each time China began to assert itself industrially, it would become rich enough to be attacked, and that would destabilize any industrialism that had formed.
What's interesting about the Chinese story, though, is where innovation came from. The examinations and civil service hierarchy played a role, but the groundbreaking cultural accomplishments always came from the "outer elite", not the high-ranking mandarins. The inner elite was stodgy and complacent, just like modern corporations with MBA culture. The artistic and scientific accomplishments people remember now tended to come from people who were exposed to the ideas of the scholastic elite, but never got into the inner circle.
I think there's a lesson here, for modern Asia (Japan's cultural exports come from people poorly regarded by that country's elite) and the West.
Venture-funded startups were an outer elite in 1975, but they've been co-opted by the inner elite. Silicon Valley, when it was a genuine outer elite, produced amazing technological advancements. Now it's just a side-show for MBAs to pop into (over the heads of engineers, as unnecessary VPs earning 10 times the equity) when they feel like doing something different. I don't know where the outer elite is now. I know that I'm probably in it (whether I intend to be or not) but, if so, we're in a nebulous state of geographic and cultural diaspora.
The interesting question is why innovation must come from an outer elite. The process seems to be like this: the inner elite sets values (scholastic achievement) judged to be socially beneficial but, at some level, organizational politics outclass those values in terms of who actually gets in. In fact, the interface between outer elite and inner elite seems to be based on that: the outer elite is as far as one can go based on the values set by that elite; the inner elite still comes down to "old style" social scarcity, connections, and favor-trading. The consequence of that is that the outer elite exemplifies those values more than the inner one and, over time, delivers more of value. I don't know how to turn this into anything actionable, but it's an interesting observation.