Investors Chronicle experienced a not untypical example of this a couple of days after Mr Osborne's speech. We had planned to cover the full-year results of Asian Citrus (ACHL), a Chinese orange grower that was worth over £1bn on Aim at the start of 2011. When the company failed to post its results on 25 September, as it had said it would, we called up its press advisers to ask why.
The answer came back in the form of a regulatory announcement that the results had been deferred "to allow time for completion of additional audit procedures to verify certain payments made by a subsidiary of the Company to one of its major suppliers". The notice implied that the auditors would not sign off the accounts unless the payments were verified.
There may be nothing sinister going on here. Asian Citrus's problems over the past year have been legion - crop disease, typhoons, spiralling costs - but so far they have stopped short of the kind of governance disasters seen at other Chinese companies listed on Aim. Still, the best-case scenario is that Asian Citrus has a casual attitude to issuing properly audited annual accounts - the backbone of investment for UK investors.
The problems at Camkids (CAMK) go well beyond trading. This week the Chinese clothing company announced the resignation of its finance director, a non-executive director and its nominated adviser (Nomad). A Nomad is a requirement of an Aim listing, so this caused its shares to be suspended; they will be cancelled if the company has not found a new Nomad within a month. Camkids had 53p of net cash on its balance sheet at the end of December, according to the latest accounts, yet its shares trade at 4p.
The overriding problem is nicely summed up by Anthony Bolton, the famous UK fund manager who moved to Hong Kong to launch Fidelity China Special Situations in 2011. A man given to measured analysis, he told me back then: "In the UK you might have questions about perhaps 1-2 per cent of management teams - where they are not telling you the full story or might be unethical. In China there is a bigger percentage that carries that management risk. That's not always because they're crooks; sometimes they're simply inexperienced at dealing with financial markets and don't understand what shareholders want."
Mr Osborne said he wanted to see "our stock markets in London and Shanghai formally connected, with UK firms raising funds from Chinese savers, and Chinese firms listing in London". This may drum up business for the City - not least for Aim, whose chief executive told our small-cap specialist Alex Newman that failures in China would not deter him from his international sales drive. But unless more is done to ensure that Chinese companies are managed in the interest of shareholders, investors and the City's reputation will suffer.
It's not just China, of course. The resources boom has left a legacy of Russian companies on Aim that also attract a discount to peers because of concerns over corporate governance. Indeed, the basic problem of shareholders trusting managers - the 'principal-agent problem' - has bedevilled public companies since their invention in the 17th century. "The directors of such companies, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own," wrote Adam Smith in his 'Wealth of Nations'.
Long-established cultural norms have softened the edge of this problem for UK public companies. Mindful of Fred Goodwin's fate, directors do not want to be pilloried in the press. But some of these cultural levers are missing overseas. This is a much bigger problem for Mr Osborne's tie-up idea than the summer correction on the Shanghai stock market or even the Chinese economic slowdown.
The chancellor's speech went on to explain why he had brought with him to China directors of institutions such as the British Museum and the Royal Shakespeare Society. "It's through our theatre and our painting and our writing and our art that a society best expresses itself and explains itself to others." Before the government makes it easier for Chinese companies to list in London, it should perhaps focus on this cultural exchange.
