My family enjoys watching the offbeat television comedy show, “Big Bang Theory” every Monday evening.  In it, the goofy characters — all brilliant but nerdy physicists — constantly play the childhood game “rock-paper-scissors” to help them decide their various daily priorities, like what to eat or what game to play.

The rock-paper-scissors game came to mind last week in reading news accounts of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official visit to China. Despite her pledge as a Presidential candidate to be tough on China’s dismal human rights record — a pledge shared by Barack Obama — it appears that the world’s economic crisis will trump any serious effort, at least anytime soon, by the United States to persuade the Chinese to clean up their persistent abuses of basic human freedoms.

Those abuses are well documented and, unfortunately, pervasive. Last summer’s Beijing Olympics may have been a spectacular success as a sports and entertainment event, but the games came at the expense of ordinary Chinese citizens, thousands of whom were dragooned into huge work gangs to build various Olympic venues with little or no pay. Recent reports out of Africa portray the Chinese as pillaging that continent’s huge natural resources of oil and minerals in sweetheart arrangements with corrupt governments who, in turn, force thousands of destitute Africans to work as virtual slaves extracting the valuable deposits. The Chinese government’s backing of the genocidal government in Sudan should provoke global outrage, but instead has raised nary an eyebrow except among committed human rights activists.

The economic crisis is real, and certainly a top priority for government attention and action. But are human rights and essential freedoms only important when times are good, credit is flowing and jobs are plentiful? Apparently, the rock-paper-scissors answer is that among competing priorities confronting nations, the protection of the rights of individuals must wait for better days.