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I'll answer this by comparing the West to each of the potential alternatives.
The Middle East: I would say the difference here stems from family structure. The Catholic church banned cousin marriage early on and this had the tendency to reduce clannishness and create a high-trust society in which cooperation on a national scale was possible. In the Muslim world on the other hand, the Arab practice of cousin marriage, which developed as a way to keep valuable herd animals within the clan under resource-poor conditions, spread across the Islamic caliphate and had the opposite effect, likely both reducing IQ due to accumulation of deleterious mutations as well as enforcing or creating tribal structures that inhibited large-scale cooperation and altruistic behavior. The Islamic Golden Age was really more of a flowering of Persian culture under the relative peace of the early Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates rather than a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon, and even they seem to have been dragged down afterwards by the burdens of repeated nomadic invasions and the impact of tribalist politics.
China: The standard answer is Jared Diamond's geographic hypothesis, where the lack of physical barriers in eastern China as compared to Europe promoted political unification, reducing interstate competition and removing incentives for the development of (mostly military) technology to get the edge on rival nations. I don't really buy into the more determinist version of this argument, but the consequences of political unity vs division, whatever their provenance, on technological development seem quite clear. During the Opium Wars Qing Dynasty soldiers were digging up centuries old cannons to use against the British because they were more advanced than anything they had produced recently. Some argue that the Chinese writing system being too difficult to learn is also a contributory factor, as mass literacy is quite important in industrial development, but the success of Japan would seem to contradict that.
India: Here, the caste system concentrated literacy and intelligence among a very small fraction of the population and had more or less the same effect as Arab tribalism in the Middle East. While the Brahmin class is clearly quite intelligent and has produced some of humanity's greatest literary works, as well as thriving on an individual basis in modern developed nations, the segregation and lack of inter-caste cooperation within India itself has created a low-trust society and retarded its development in recent times relative to China.
Eastern Orthodox Europe: Geography may be a factor here as well. Russia was devastated by the Mongol invasions and subsequent centuries long occupation, and since then has tended to centralization, forever paranoid of its flat open borders without any natural barriers. Like in China, the stability of a large autocratic state tends to discourage experimentation and technological advancement. I'll also note that civilization and settled societies came to this area relatively late compared to the lands to its west and south.
Native American Civilizations: These simply did not have enough time to develop, the region having been settled later, and the societies in Mesoamerica and the Andes were just reaching the cultural level of the early Bronze Age on the eve of colonization. There was also minimal communication between the two major civilizations, as large stretches of ocean and tropical jungles lay between them, so each had to evolve in almost complete isolation.
Everywhere Else: I'll go with the cold winters hypothesis here. The descendants of people who migrated north during the ice ages (i.e. Europeans, Middle Easterners (and by extension the Indo-Aryans of South Asia), East Asians, and Native Americans) were under substantial selective pressure for intelligence, long-term planning, and resourcefulness to survive the harsh conditions.
Re the Muslim world, the refusal to adopt the printing press for centuries certainly must have been a factor.
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Isn't Japanese writing quite a bit easier to learn than Chinese, although still more difficult than the Latin Alphabet?
I mean, to be literate in Japanese one must master two phonetic systems (Hiragana and Katakana) in addition to thousands of Kanji characters, with each of those Kanji having potentially multiple readings, not all of which are monosyllabic as they would be in Chinese. If Japan went through the same process as South Korea and phased out the use of characters for most written purposes that would simplify things, but that is definitely not the case at present and the average educated Japanese has memorized as about as many characters as his Chinese counterpart.
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