Rep. Chris Smith and other House Republican human-rights leaders are criticizing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent accommodating comments about China.

Last week just before her first visit to China as Secretary of State, Clinton declared that protection for human rights in China is subordinate to the Obama administration’s other priorities of working with China’s Communist regime on issues like the economic crisis and climate change.

“Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these [rights] issues, and we have to continue to press them,” Clinton said, Baptist Press reported. “But our pressing on those issues can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis.”

Smith, R-N.J., cited China’s egregious human-rights violations — especially those that occur in its implementation of its coercive “one-child” population-control program — at a Feb. 26 press conference in Washington that featured former political prisoners of the Chinese government.

“Last week, Secretary Clinton told the global media that concern for the protection of human rights of the Chinese people can’t be allowed to ‘interfere’ with the economic crisis, climate change, and security — as if human rights were disconnected and irrelevant to those issues,” Smith said, according to a press release posted on his website.

“With those words, the Secretary effectively took human rights off the U.S. agenda with the Chinese Government. It was a shocking display of pandering, immediately understood by the Chinese government, whose party-controlled press rejoiced. Secretary Clinton made it clear in Beijing that the Obama Administration has chosen to peddle U.S. debt to the largest dictatorship in the world over defending the Chinese people from its government’s policies of torture, forced labor, forced abortion, religious persecution, human sex trafficking, gendercide, and genocide.”

Continued Smith, “Forced abortion deserves a special word in this list of human rights abuses, as it is the only one that the Democratic Congressional leadership appears determined to fund with U.S. taxpayer money. Yesterday the Democratic leadership blocked amendments to the FY 2009 Omnibus spending bill that would prevent President Obama from lavishing $50 million of U.S. taxpayer money on the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). U.S. Government reports and the international media have consistently found that the UNFPA systematically aids and abets the Chinese government’s one child per couple forced abortion policy. That cruel, anti-family policy has made brothers and sisters illegal in China and murdered tens of millions of children and wounded countless Chinese women.”

Said Smith, “The protection and promotion of human rights ought to be at the core of our relationship with an egregious violator like China — but the Secretary has signaled that for her it will be a talking point at the bottom of the diplomatic agenda — one she’s in no hurry to get to. “