MySpace China Woes: BusinessWeek’s Bruce Einhorn has a piece about MySpace.cn and its efforts to come up with a new business model in the wake of some big setbacks — most recently, the departure of CEO Luo Chuan.

There’s certainly a big gap between MySpace China and its Chinese rivals, though. According to BDA, MySpace China hopes to have 10 million registered users by the end of the year. In contrast, market leader Qzone, owned by Shenzhen-based instant-messaging giant Tencent Holdings, already has 105 million registered users. Another Chinese SNS operator, 51.com, has 95 million.

Einhorn’s piece gives MySpace China rivals and critics a chance to sound off. These include Brad Greenspan, one of MySpace’s original U.S. founders who was famously unappy with the sale to News Corp; and Joe Chen, who runs the parent company of leading SNS Xiaonei:

As the local players become stronger, some in the industry are dismissive of MySpace China and its high-powered backers as paper tigers. “Everybody knows it’s a U.S. brand,” says Brad Greenspan, former CEO of eUniverse, where MySpace got launched, and now chairman of BroadWebAsia, a West Hollywood (Calif.) investor in Chinese Internet sites. “If you want to spend time on a site that’s about you, it’s harder to pull that off with a U.S. brand. It just doesn’t feel authentic.” In China, SNS “is entirely a local game,” boasts Joseph Chen, chief executive of Xiaonei owner OPI [Oak Pacific International]. Not only are Chinese users reluctant to switch to a newcomer but many young Chinese students without strong English skills don’t even know how to spell the name MySpace. “You tell a typical kid in China who has never heard about MySpace and ask the person to spell it, 90% of the time the kid has no clue,” says Chen.

Shanda Joins the SNS game? We’re written on this blog about the strength of tie-ups between online gaming companies and SNS: Giant Interactive’s $50 million investment in 51.com comes to mind. Now, Gang Lu writes about Shanda’s rumored efforts to enter the SNS space through

Shanda (NASDAQ: SNDA), the leading interactive entertainment media company in China and offers a variety of internet based entertainment services such as online role playing games (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or “MMORPGs”), casual games, chess and board games, network PC games, cartoons, literature, and music, is now seriously looking into SNS market, told by an insider. The big question is how they are going to do it?

Internet Bar is a very popular place for Chinese to surf Internet, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities. It was reported that there are over 100,000 Internet bards across China and 70 million Chinese netizen are accessing Internet from Internet bars. The figure needs to be verified, but it does tells the fact that Internet bar is a very important battle field in China web. Over 70% of Chinese Internet bars are using a management software which is offered by a Chengdu based company, Sicent Technology Co. Ltd, and Sicent was acquired by Shanda in Sept, 2003.

Indeed, Shanda’s acquisition of Sicent really could position it well to push an SNS service through Internet cafes. Companies like Sicent, which do install management, security, patching and the like, are also being examined for their advertising possibilities by many interested parties.

New Code of Conduct for U.S. Internet Companies in Censoring Countries: Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo — the three Internet companies who were browbeaten by an indignant U.S. Congress for their alleged complicity in keeping China’s Internet censored, have taken the wraps off a “Global Network Initiative,” or GNI, that aims to “protect the freedom of expression and the privacy rights of their users.” Apparently, signatories to the GNI “promise to reveal attempts by governments to pressure them into violating worldwide standards regarding online privacy or access to information,” says an AFP report on this.

Obviously this isn’t going to settle the issue, and it’s certainly not going to placate groups like RSF and EFF, which will continue to demand the impossible from these companies. (RSF, or Reporters Without Borders, pulled out of talks with the GNI companies last month, saying “loopholes and weak language” in it leave room for abuses. We’ll see whether it heads off legislation pending in Congress like the “Global Online Freedom Act,” which (at least in earlier incarnations) contained language that any country would clearly see as violating its national sovereignty — most notably, calling on U.S. companies, even with servers physically located within the P.R.C., to turn any requests for personal information from Chinese law enforcement agencies to the U.S. Department of Justice for approval first. Yeah, right.