What successes are you thinking of?

The only two that come to mind for me are Korea and Japan (I could easily be overlooking some), and really the former happened as a part of the latter (Korea was ruled by Japan for the 35 years prior to WWII).

As I understand it South Korea was at least nominally under local democratic rule from the start.

I'm not sure that's a big enough sample set to be making generalizations from, and even if you are happy with a sample set of 2 I'm not really sure south korea fits the mold you're describing.

That said, I could definitely be missing some examples that would make the argument more convincing.