Taiwan was a Japanese colony for 50 years and Japan deliberately "westernized" the local political and industrial culture. Whereas elsewhere the Japanese didn't see the locals as fit for modernization and so didn't bother. The KMT were beneficiaries of this when they took over the island, even though they implemented a program of sinicization.
Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.
Lee Kuan Yew famously fashioned Singaporean culture almost out of whole cloth as he believed that without a radical transformation in the social and economic culture that Singapore would quickly disintegrate. I can't find good quotes at the moment, but he had some really harsh opinions about the local ethnic Chinese culture from which he emerged; that it was corrupt, chaotic, criminal and an existential threat to the new nation.