I'm not sure how you came up with this, Singapore and Hong Kong meritocratic? They're both oligarchies where all the land and influence in the city is owned by a few powerful families. Also the fact that excluding Vietnam all of these countries are either islands or have a single land border (don't think a lot of people are coming into South Korea from North Korea?) probably makes controlling the disease a lot easier.

Previous experience with SARS is a better candidate for "primary determiner."

People are probably downvoting you because it's generally frowned upon to make baseless "just-so" claims, especially in something as difficult to make credible claims in as geopolitics, and especially when it asserts the superiority of some groups over others (or appears to.)

That all being said, there have been studies of how "meritocratic" different societies are (albeit I don't know how that is operationalized) and there will be very quantitative measures of how well each country weathers the pandemic; someone could certainly (when the data is in) check to see how those features tend to relate.

It is far, far too early in this pandemic to start grading the efficacy of any jurisdiction's approach.

How do you even define "best people"? Any how exactly are these people "rise to the top" for the leaders to follow in these countries? Some more details examples would be helpful.