China ex-official calls for dialogue with Dalai Lama

BEIJING (Reuters) - The most senior Chinese official jailed over the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has urged China to sit down for frank talks with Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, to end strife in the region.

Monk-led protests turned violent in the predominantly Buddhist region earlier this month, and then spilled over into Chinese provinces populated by Tibetans.

While the Chinese government has blamed the Dalai Lama for what it called rioting, the ousted senior official Bao Tong said the Dalai Lama was the "only Tibetan leader with the hope of presiding over a reconciliation agreement between Tibetans and Han Chinese".

"So long as the central (government) sits down for dialogue with the Dalai Lama and shows great wisdom, great decisiveness and great boldness of vision, the Lhasa incident can be handled well," Bao wrote in a statement e-mailed to Reuters on Monday.

Bao was once the top aide to Zhao Ziyang who was ousted as Communist Party chief in 1989 for opposing the military crackdown on the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations.

Bao's criticism of China's official line on the recent trouble in Tibet and the Dalai Lama is one of the few voices of public dissent from Chinese citizens of the ethnic majority, the Hans, who have generally backed the government's handling of the unrest.

On Saturday, 30 dissidents issued a letter urging China to let international observers and reporters into Tibet and saying that Beijing's policies towards ethnic minorities have stoked discontent.

Bao, who was jailed for seven years and is now an outspoken critic of the government, said many Westerners refused to believe China because it had a "history and tradition of irresponsibly and arbitrarily meting out verdicts on major cases".

He spoke of the Chinese leadership's "hastiness, subjective assertions and leaving mistakes uncorrected" in 1989.

The government only fuelled Western suspicions by banning foreign reporters from traveling to Tibet, said Bao, who is under round-the-clock police surveillance.

China has said rioting left 18 "innocent" civilians and a policeman dead and insists security forces exercised "massive restraint". Tibet's government-in-exile says up to 100 people were killed and that Chinese troops opened fire on protesters.

Zhao died in 2005 after more than 15 years under house arrest. He was replaced by Jiang Zemin, who in turn retired in 2002 to make way for Hu Jintao.

(Editing by Chris Buckley and Ken Wills)