Maybe if we started with the point of view that SE Asians have the right to determine their own government, and that may not look like our western ideas of "acceptable" government, instead of starting with the assumption that these people need saving from tyrants and monsters?
Right now the status quo in most of SE Asia is rapidly accelerating wealth. In Europe that brought the kind of social changes that demanded democracy. Maybe leaving them "undisturbed" is exactly the right thing to do...
For instance, "Western" medicine is undeniably better than "traditional X" medicine. Because what people actually mean by "Western" medicine is modern medicine leaving behind all the historical western folk remedies that didn't work and keeping the folk remedies that worked. A lot of modern medicine comes from countries which would not be considered Western. You can of course split hairs in this discussion as well.
Censorship? Protectionism? These are less obvious concerns. That someone does not see the tragedy in holding a wife accountable for the democratic leanings and agitations of the husband and seeks to punish the husband by imposing punishments on the wife is so obviously unjust to me. The possibility that maybe society can be better when punishments are imposed in this way (the empirical question that would justify it under a utilitarian analysis) is just unconvincing to me (because I doubt it is true, I devalue utilitarian justice over individual justice and I don't even think the husband committed a crime). I could be wrong, though.
There's a lot of "forcing [of] values" going on in many SE Asian cultures, but the forcing is indigenous and towards maintaining existing power structures against other indigenous desires for reform.
If left alone, those "'better' answers" you speak of could be to the question of how authoritarians can suppress the kinds of cultural and political changes that happened in the West to bring about democracy.
In the end, I don't think SE Asian democracy would look exactly like modern Western society, but that doesn't mean that the status quo should be left undisturbed as some kind of experiment.