Cisco Systems announced plans to boost China’s share of its outsourcing budget to 40 percent by the end of 2006.

The release quoted Jia-Bin Duh, president of Cisco’s China operations, who said it spent about $5 billion on outsourcing in China in 2004, or 25 percent of its global total. He declined to elaborate on how much the company plans to spend this year.

China is one of Cisco’s top five countries for revenue, together with the United States, Japan, Britain and Germany.

Duh said he expects “business to take off” once China launches third-generation mobile phone services, which will boost demand for Cisco technology.

China has been in the news a lot lately, what with the kerfuffle over Microsoft’s essentially enabling censorship in the Chinese version of its blogging tool.

According to Reporters Without Borders, an organization dedicated to fighting for press freedom and human rights all over the world, when a Chinese blogger attempts to post a message containing specific terms, a warning appears stating, “This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.”

These phrases include terms such as “democracy”, “Dalai Lama”, “Falungong”, “4 June” (the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), “China + corruption”, or “human rights.”

It’s just not right. And Microsoft should reconsider. I know they won't. But  they should. And our government might worry less about steroids, and more about censorship.