I went to elementary, junior high, and high school in schools that were approximately 60-70% Asian. When I see things like this, I am never surprised. In many of those cultures, it is the norm to ride your kids as hard as you can until they achieve the results you want in school, music, sports, or whatever. I don't think any race is naturally smarter or more disciplined than any other, but if it is the cultural norm to enforce very high standards from an early age, you will be able to produce toddlers who play like that. I think it all comes from the fact that a lot of those countries are pretty crowded, and the competition for jobs is more intense than it is here.
I say this not to try to enforce stereotypes, I knew a lot of Asian kids that were allowed to have what the Western world would consider a normal upbringing. But man, some of them had some pretty old-school parents with very strong opinions about what their kids should be allowed to do, and some of those kids had no lives outside of family functions, church, and school. I remember one kid lived near my best friend, and we tried to get her to come out and play on a number of occasions, and she told us she couldn't because she had so much work to do, and that her mom would hit her with a tennis racket if she didn't get it done by a certain time.
It was interesting to spend 1st -12th grade with the same group of people, because I saw how that type of parenting could go either way. I would say about 1/4 of them ended up going to Ivy League-type schools, 1/2 were average, and 1/4 completely rebelled and wanted to be crazy gangsters. But a lot of them, even the scholastically successful ones, really resented their parents.