US PRESIDENT George W. Bush's call last week for a new era of corporate integrity was widely dismissed as long on rhetoric and short on radicalism.
The jaundiced response should be no surprise. It is hard to accept Mr Bush as a crusading knight for business ethics, given that he - and key members of his administration - personally have profited from some of the dubious practices he is now roundly condemning.
Yet one of the policy prescriptions he put forward was eye-catching indeed - at least for an observer in Asia.
Mr Bush said independent directors should be in a majority on company boards, endorsing proposals put forward by the Business Roundtable, the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq. Further, all the members of the audit, nominating and compensation committees should be independents.
In Hong Kong, the stock exchange cannot quite find the stomach to enact rules that would place genuinely independent directors on the boards of listed companies at all - let alone put them in control.
In its consultation paper on proposed changes to the listing rules to improve corporate governance, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing tinkered at the edges of reform.
It proposed tightening up on the definition of 'independent', to exclude as independent directors anyone who, for example, had provided professional services to or received financial assistance from the company.