If you want to build a nation study China.
The Chinese would've told you to study the Japanese.
All those Asian tigers just imitated what Japan did.
Within a generation in the Meiji period they caught up with the west in technology and started building better tech not soon after.
After ww2 they rebuild Japan, took the lead globally in cars, electronics and were heading towards being the richest country until the financial crisis happened in the 90s... after that they've plateaued into herbivores.
China is just a cheap imitation that hasn't even hit $10k gdp per capita yet.
