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By Fawn Johnson
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- A Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) senior executive apologized Tuesday for an inflammatory quote about a popular Chinese dissident group in an internal company document.
A 90-page PowerPoint presentation that Cisco produced both in Chinese and English cites the Chinese government's attempts to quash the Falun Gong religious movement. The document is from 2002.
Cisco's English translation of the presentation lists one goal of the Chinese information security agency in this way - "Combat Falun Gong evil religion and other hostiles."
Cisco Senior Vice President Mark Chandler told a Senate subcommittee that the document was prepared by a low-level Chinese engineer for other employees. "I was appalled when I saw the line in the slide, and I'm very disappointed to see it," Chandler said.
At the time the document was produced, Cisco made about $10 million in sales to China's public security bureau, Chandler said. He said the sale consisted " exclusively" of office automation equipment.
"The only equipment that has been sold as a result of that is routing and switching equipment," Chandler said. "There was nothing there that had anything to do with censorship."
Shiyu Zhou, a deputy director at the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, said Cisco's document demonstrates the company's attempts to target "China's great firewall" - the government Internet monitoring and censoring division - as a " major customer."
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., expressed concerns with the document, although his reaction was more muted than Zhou's. "The subcommittee has received some troubling information about Cisco's activities in China," he said. Durbin chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, which held the hearing.
Cisco is not the first company to come under scrutiny for its dealings with China and other repressive regimes. Both Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) and Google Inc. ( GOOG) have faced questions about their operations in China, which human rights activists say may have led to the imprisonment of dissidents.
Chandler said Cisco's business model is distinct from that of Yahoo and Google because it does not deal with content that could be filtered for political purposes. "Cisco is not a service or content provider nor are we a network manager," he said.
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