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But is there any reason, other than money and some bureaucratic overheads, why that could only work in China?

I bet you could do it in same timeline in any sufficiently developed country by airdropping a 40ft container full of gold bars to a University front yard, and declaring that first team to deliver the motor gets 2/3 of unclaimed bars included with full legal and tax services plus one bar each for supplier coordinators. Do it in world's top engineering schools like MIT or ETHZ, and professors would come running to it with off the shelf motors in hand, ripped out of some equipment and machined in haste to suit your requirements in matters of minutes.

It's not like that motor would be made using some future tech that only Shenzhen workers truly understand, but it's probably like they're made with basic standard quantum physics taught at any engineering schools that they too were taught. The difference is that they're taking your task with good amount of efforts for the money you pay.

I don't mean to support(or interfere with it in any ways, as I'm not from US however I cut and twist it and I'm not supposed to) the current US admin, but they kinda-sorta have a point with its weird tariff and exchange rate insistences. There is no free market competition possible with the brain-hour cost China is charging unless some completely insane countermeasures were taken, whether it's million percent tariffs or currency exchanges based on physical mass of bank notes.

The shop calling shops and working together story is the same as how industrial zones in Japan were described, in the past. Same probably can be said about 20th century US or 19th century German industrial towns. That's not the source of the Chinese superpower.