EBay Inc., in its second big pullback from Asia, is shutting down its main Web site in China and replacing it with a site that would be largely run by a Beijing-based Internet company, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The report quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that the San Jose, Calif., company will announce as early as Tuesday that it is taking a 49 percent stake in the new site in partnership with online portal and wireless operator Tom Online Inc.

"Working with Tom should be a good thing for eBay, so they have a company in China that understands the local market," said Henry Yang, chief executive of research firm iResearch Consulting Group.

While eBay has seen some success in Europe, its Asian expansion has been rocky. EBay expanded into Japan in 1999 but was five months behind rival Yahoo Inc., which launched its own auction site that year in partnership with Japan's Softbank Corp. EBay never caught up with Yahoo and left Japan in 2002.

In China, eBay acquired online-auction company EachNet for 150 million dollars in 2003, but the latter still remains second to TaoBao, which is a unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba.com Corp.

TaoBao had 67 percent of the Chinese auction market for the first six months of the year, compared with eBay EachNet's 29 percent, the report quoted China Internet Network Information Center as saying.