Making cheap tat cheaper than others with no government involvement is not an industrial policy. The government in Hong Kong did not direct or subsidize any industry. Export led industrialization just happened because of a policy of unilateral free trade, because people were trying to make money so they made what they thought would sell and doubled down on the things that worked. While the initial wave of refugees were more highly educated than the average Chinese and that probably continued to be true most of the refugees were always illiterate peasants.
I know HK is often held up as a miracle of complete and total laissez-faire, but that is largely myth.
1949 through to about 1970 whilst there was no formal economic policy, there emphatically was subsidy. The administration was providing social housing for those refugees, education for their children, infrastructure programs that were often more ambitious than in the UK - providing complete new industrial towns, and land reclamation. There was a policy to limit cost of living increases as far as possible as the fledgling industry relied on low labour cost to compete.
There were also export restrictions on textiles and clothes - the backbone of the HK economy up until the seventies, perhaps longer. Those restrictions were certainly in place with the UK and Europe, not sure about the wider world.
The large subsidy during development merely wasn't direct to industry. Yet with textiles and cheap plastics, the two industries that formed the bulk of HK's exports, they happened to be two with low startup capital costs. As a result the HK economy was heavily skewed toward small and medium businesses and low startup costs.
