Last week, the Hong Kong government bowed to the city's business lobbies and made yet another couple of tweaks to its long-stalled competition bill.
Officials hope the latest changes will dilute resistance to the proposed law, allowing them to push it through the Legislative Council before July.
On the face of it, last week's modifications look fairly innocuous. The government raised the threshold that will let small businesses get away with so-called minor infringements of the new law.
From now on companies with less than HK$40 million in turnover will be exempt from penalties, up from HK$11 million in earlier drafts of the bill. Where more than one company is involved, the combined turnover threshold rises to HK$200 million.
The idea is that these concessions to business groups are a small price to pay for finally getting the bill passed into law.
Yet the cumulative effect of these and earlier compromises amounts to a major watering down of official policy, and reflects the government's ambivalence to the whole concept of a competition law.