Asian teachers' reluctance to empower students has been claimed to be an significant barrier preventing their students from practising student-centred learning. To promote student-centredness in Asian classrooms, this study aimed to develop strategies that could enable Asian teachers to delegate part of their authority to students. Twelve college teachers and six hundred and fifteen Vietnamese college students participated in this one-semester study. The results revealed that "artificial" innovations such as forming group work and regularly questioning students in class did not mean empowering students in active learning. Students were only positioned and given opportunities to engage in proper student-centredness when Asian teachers were able to promote students' complex knowledge, minimize individual instruction but maximize group supervision, employing formative assessment and adopting complimentary verbal behaviours. The study strongly suggested that reformers need to take teachers' comments into consideration to design culturally appropriate strategies that could assist teachers to make real changes. (Contains 6 tables.)