Microsoft Corp.’s European and Chinese operations experienced an executive shakeup when Microsoft China’s CEO Simon Leung quit for “personal and family reasons.”  Leung will leave his position at the end of the month and will stay on as an adviser until August.

Ralph Haupter, currently vice-president at Microsoft Germany, will take on Leung’s role in combating software piracy and boosting sales of Windows Phone smartphones in China.  Haupter was a former executive at IBM.

Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft U.K., and Michel van der Bel, chief operating officer for greater China, will be trading places.  It wasn’t clear why Frazer and van der Bel were trading places, since it was noted that Leung and van der Bel were responsible for the growth of Microsoft in China.

The greater China region covers mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

“China represents an unprecedented opportunity for growth across the breadth of our business,” Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said in the statement. Haupter will report to Courtois, Microsoft said.

The Business Software Alliance reported the annual commercial value of software pirated in China country amounts to $7.78 billion, but the group also reported that the percentage of software being pirated in China dropped to 78% in 2010.  This is due to Microsoft’s close relationship with the Chinese authorities, deals with PC makers to have their software preinstalled on more computers, and even price drops for Microsoft Office software to encourage buyers to choose authorized software instead of the pirated versions.

Before Leung’s resignation, he was in talks with Chinese officials regarding the regulation that prohibits Microsoft from selling the Xbox 360 in the country.  No news yet on that matter.

In other Microsoft news, the company will deliver the Live.edu suite of online tools, which include Outlook Live, Office Live, and 25 GB per user of SkyDrive cloud storage to 7.5 million students and professors across technical colleges maintained by the All India Council For Technical Education (AICTE).

“In many cases these students didn’t have services like this before,” said Anthony Salcito, Microsoft’s VP for worldwide education, in an interview. “Many of the schools are very remote and it’s hard to physically deploy software to those campuses and schools; that’s one of the benefits of the cloud.”