Japan was already industrialized prior to WW2, and was basically complete in its industrialization by around WW1 if not earlier by a couple decades.
S. Korea could serve as a comparison, but there's a big difference in that it got massive influx of foreign investment from the US, with a major reason being that it serve as outpost against Communism spreading.
When the geopolitical situation started to change between US and China in the late 60s-early 70s, Mao sensed it and already started to have talks with the US as seen with Nixon + Kissinger, which later became the foundation that allowed the influx of foreign capital into the country. Prior to this, China was basically like NK today, with absolutely no outside support whatsoever, with an economy, infrastructure, etc., which includes even basic stuff like irrigation destroyed from civil war, WW2, etc. It was extremely capital deficient. People act like China prior to '49 was some wonderland, and that once the Communist came in, they destroyed everything and therefore there was mass starvation. Not really. China sucked prior to '49, and reading e.g. some statistics from American sinologists like e.g Jonathan Spence, you know that the basic peasant (which represented the large majority of China's population) daily diet consisted of almost no meat, and simply what they called gruel, every day of the year. A peasant normal diet would simply be e.g. sweet potatoes flour mixed with water everyday with maybe some vegetables.
The mass starvations in the 70s and 80s were because of that same government; while Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong were rapidly developing, China was putting people in jail for trying to sell their goods and agricultural products on the private market. The GDP per capita of Taiwan is still three times higher than that of mainland China, which wouldn't be the case if China didn't have a government that made private enterprise illegal for a few decades.