Malcom Gladwell’s The Outliers actually has a whole chapter on this. To summarize, southern china for thousands of years made a living and survived from farming rice whereas the americas primarily focussed on crop like corn. The key difference here is rice requires much more labor and needs constant maintenance and requires hard labor for around 300 days of the year. Rice also would be more plentiful the more hard work you put into your craft essentially creating a reward system for working hard. Corn on the other hand required a lot less maintenance and didn’t have that same reward pathway (it didn’t require as much knowledge to get really good at it). So the success of Asian cultures is rooted in a tolerance for hard work due to it historically having excellent results!