It's a different culture where everyone obeys the rules. Across Asia, mask wearing is normal. Nobody moans about it. Here in the West many see it as an attack on individual freedom.
This is bollocks, I live in Asia and people don't wear masks, and rule-breaking is de rigeur, far more so than the UK.
So you don't hear the press talking about the $1 ten minute covid tests Senegal developed months ago or the countries where life has managed to go on relatively unscathed.
ORLY
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-54388340
"4 days ago"
Dr Sall says the manufacturing of the antibody test has already begun and they should be released in the coming weeks.
It will work like a pregnancy test, costing close to $1 (£.80) with results in just 10 minutes.
The home test that will show if someone currently has coronavirus has been delayed and is now being validated by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, but there are hopes it will still be out before the end of the year.
So it doesn't exist yet.
This is the question western countries should be asking, but due to racism, exceptionalism and arrogance that Asian and African countries can't possibly know what they're doing they instead compare their 'success' to other failures such as Sweden and the USA.
Exceptionalism is valid. Where I lived the covid-19 response is an absolute shitshow hamstrung by stone-age religious loons, lack of enforcement: none of the local clinic staff have been tested for covid, dead bodies from covid are dug up due to fear among the population. Positive cases don't include most of the tests, because antibody tests are used as the first line of testing, not actual virus tests.
When I have had to try to get people under national health into vaguely modern hospitals they are full for months on end, and now with covid it's far worse.
The fact is when the annual HIV deaths each and every year in South Africa are more than double total UK covid deaths, or the annual malaria deaths in many African countries, then covid-19 just doesn't pose the same kind of health challenge as existing diseases in those countries.
The fact is death and case statistics are not comparable between developing countries and the UK, which is one thing, but another is that it doesn't even present the same health challenge to a developed country as to a developing one. Covid-19 is almost uniquely good at attacking rich developed countries, in that the average covid-19 death is OLDER than the average age of death. Risk of death grows exponentially with age; the median age of South Africans is 26 - the UK is 40. If you have a young population than the risk due to covid-19 is exponentially smaller than with an aged population.
The second reason for exceptionalism here is that covid-19 poses a particular risk to countries with adequate healthcare to start with - where I am people die at home and are buried by their families within 24 hours. Covid is here, people are spreading it by engaging in karaoke, religious activities, activities like land trains with 100 people in, etc., almost entirely without masks, there is no abatement, no magic $1 test, or $0.50 medical treatment, but it just isn't posing an existential threat.
Covid attacks old, rich countries, and it fucks up the comfortable notion that they have medical care from cradle to grave at all times, by filling hospitals with wheezing old men. This notion is not present for most of the world to start with, so covid doesn't threaten what never existed.
Of course not every country is as young as South Africa, though few have a European population pyramid. That's not to say that some lower income countries have not done very well - it seems that for example Vietnam has had an effective approach, but the alternative shitshow incompetent approach of Indonesia or the Philippines doesn't seem to be causing those countries the same kind of terror that it does for the UK.
The exceptionalism seems to be that, because covid WILL fuck up the health care systems and kill the elderly of Western countries, that developing countries should be so concerned as they are. On the whole, for developing countries without significant tourism industries, it seems extremely unlikely that covid poses as big a health threat as many other existing diseases. So why not go on with life? That's happening here, covid-management is minimal and life is going on, excluding those who've died from covid of course. But then when, say, the annual road deaths of young, healthy people in Thailand is many times the total of UK deaths of people under 65 from covid-19, and yet Thailand (and most of the rest of SE Asia) lives with this mass carnage with a shrug, it's not obvious that Thailand's covid shut-down was particularly rational. I mean it doesn't seem logical that my neighbours would have their children wear masks against covid, when those same children aged 12 and 13 drive motorbikes to school, with no helmet, and some of them will die as a result.
Covid poses a threat to the hygienic risk-free, die-when-you-are-90 Western approach to life. It's nothing like the same risk to countries when there are more day-to-day concerns of adequate nutrition, and where life expectancy may be a decade or several short of the UK.
(I have no idea about China specifically, as per the OP, but the generalizations in this thread about 'Asia' and 'Africa' seemed particularly foolish.)