Are aviation regulators generally slower to issue orders affecting their "own" aircraft manufacturers?
I was many years in the industry with an OEM and have had various minor peripheral roles in certification and continuing airworthiness projects at the system level, giving me a kind of ring side seat.  And I would say that you tend to get more hair-trigger reactions from non-western regulators (China/Russia et.al), and that this is because there is a way lower level of trust between the regulator and OEM than with Western regulators.  

Now, although it all went to hell in this case with respect to Boeing/FAA, there has to be some level of trust or else the regulator would have to constantly audit the manufacturer every time they scratched their butts.  It doesn't mean that the FAA just lets Boeing do whatever it feels like, but it does mean that they will tend to accept reports and analysis submitted without too much cross examination if things seem reasonable, and that's how situations like this can slip through.

Unfortunately the trust relationship broke down in the MAX case because Boeing perhaps could be said to have abused its trust relationship with the FAA.  Having been burned, you can be sure the FAA will tighten up its oversight of Boeing quite a bit, for a while anyway.

In non western countries the trust relationship is not very robust, so regulators will pull the trigger quite quickly.  This can cause its own problems.  You also have the tendency of non-western regulators to have much more severe punishment regimes, to the point of jail time for mistakes made in good faith.  This encourages people to hide their mistakes (a major problem in both China and Russia in manufacturing, maintenance and flight operations). So in the long run, in spite of the MAX fiasco, the low trust regime is much worse.