China Tech News reports:

AOL’s research and development company has been unveiled in Beijing with the Chinese name of Aolong (Beijing) Technology Development Co., Ltd.

According to Chinese media, Aolong formally landed in Beijing at the end of last year. The company has rented a two-floor office space which can hold over a hundred staff in a science park in Beijing.

Aolong Beijing is reported to have three major departments: Labs, Mobile and Online Publishing. Of these, Labs mainly deals with next-generation Internet technology, Mobile specializes in the application and development of mobile communications related website and terminals, and Online Publishing does something related to aol.cn.

The unveiling of Aolong means that AOL has taken a tangible step in returning to colonize the Chinese mainland market. Early in 2001, AOL set up a company with the same Chinese name with Lenovo (then called Legend) and jointly launched with it a doomed Chinese portal website FM365.com. That website failed, leading to the closure of the joint venture and the sale of the website in 2004. AOL also previously had a lukewarm investment in second-tier Chinese website portal China.com.

All these past blunders for AOL makes one wonder “how long will Aolong” survive?

AOL Labs is mostly a collection of widgets and tools to integrate AOL content into browsers and social networking sites.

AOL Mobile allows users to receive AOL services (such as internet messaging and search) via their mobile phone.

AOL online publishing is its once walled-garden content service, now an online portal.

Three problems with this effort:

AOL is absolutely nowhere in the online communications space in China and I would guess they have no hope of gaining any significant market share. Developing widgets to support AOL communications tools is a waste of time and money

The model for providing third party services on mobile phones in China requires partnering with China Mobile or China Unicom, AOL is way too late in the game to have any solid hopes with either

Sina, Sohu, Netease, etc., etc. China has numerous big online portals and lots of smaller ones, the AOL brand (or Aolong, for that matter) will be lucky to even be considered irrelevant any time soon

This is the final piece in AOL’s greater China strategy. The Taiwan and Hong Kong sites are already up and running. aol.cn is not up yet, but AOL has secured the domain name.

Time-Warner is sprucing up AOL in the hopes of turning the once-iconic brand around. They recently plunked down US$850 million for second-tier social networking site Bebo to beef up AOL in that space and are planning on localizing AOL in thirty more countries.

Time-Warner, with its huge list of television channels, magazines, and publishing companies certainly has enough content to provide. However, it’s all available through RSS feeds that can be fed into any portal. Not much in the way of synergy there. AOL has been in decline for a few years now and the greater China effort will do nothing to stop that.

The question is not how long will Aolong survive, but why did they bother in the first place?

And the one sure-fire way to establish the AOL brand in China? Explain that in addition to AOL, Time-Warner owns CNN. That’s bound to get some attention.

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