The thing that changed in Taiwan is they started building industries where they needed to produce their own intellectual property. As that became more important, they started seeing the value of respecting IP.

With software piracy, the government got so serious about it, they instituted fines for businesses set at 400x the price of any software being pirated. So a pirated copy of Windows used by a bank, say, could get very expensive very fast... perhaps still cheaper than buying Windows for every computer but presumably that purchase would be part of the corrective action mandated, with the fine being on top of that.

But... Taiwan has a democratically elected government, not whatever system China has (I truly don't know, because it's so opaque... it's certainly not communist). Results may be different.