By Jane Macartney

BEIJING, July 23 (Reuter) - Ethnic Tibetans make up the vast majority of people in the remote and troubled Himalayan region and they are not in danger of being swamped by a flood of Chinese immigrants, the Xinhua news agency says.

"Tibet is a region, where the Tibetan people live in compact communities and 96 percent of the population in the region are of Tibetans or people of other local minority ethnic groups," the official news agency quoted Cering Samzhub, vice-chairman of the regional government, as saying in a report late on Saturday.

The region's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama, has warned repeatedly that thousands of ethnic Han Chinese immigrants are pouring into Tibet as part of a policy by Beijing to overwhelm the local Tibetan population.

Cering Samzhub told a visiting British official that Tibet had the highest proportion of the dominant ethnic group, or Tibetans, of any of China's five autonomous regions, designated that way because of their large non-Han ethnic groups, Xinhua said. There is no such a thing as "Han immigration" in Tibet, he said.

International human-rights groups have charged Beijing with trying to quash pro-independence unrest in Tibet and demand for the return of the Dalai Lama from self-imposed exile in India by flooding the region with ethnic Han officials and workers.

Cering Samzhub said a total of 18,000 Han were working in Tibet, accounting for less than 30 percent of total cadres and workers employed by the government. Most would apply to return to their home provinces at around the age of 30, he said.

Tibet has a population of two million, according to official figures, which does not include Chinese People's Liberation Army soldiers deployed both for defence along the border with India and as a deterrent to anti-Chinese activists.

Cering Samzhub said Han people seen in the streets of the capital, Lhasa, and other cities in Tibet were largely migrants, now a normal phenomenon all over China. He said Han visitors had helped boost Tibet's economy but they were not permitted to become citizens of Lhasa or rural farmers. "Tibet has a large amount of barren land, for example, and we have tried to hire farmers from inland areas to open up the land, but in vain," he said. "They simply could not survive the harsh living conditions, not to say doing farm work."

Tibet has sent four groups of ethnic Han cadres and government workers back to their homes elsewhere in China since the 1980s and has a policy of taking university graduates from other provinces, allowing them to return after eight years.

Chinese sources say the flow of Chinese volunteers to work in one of the most remote and backward areas of China has dried up recently, despite the lure of higher salaries.

That shortage forced Beijing this year to launch a high-profile campaign to virtually canonise an ethnic Han official who worked for years in Tibet, leaving behind his family in China and adopting two Tibetan orphan children, before he was killed in a car crash last year.

Officials have not revealed whether the campaign to promote Kong Fansen as a modern-day hero has evoked the hoped-for response, but Cering Samzhub said the region had recently selected more than 500 cadres to work in Tibet, "They brought us information and advanced management and even projects, but they are scheduled to work here for only three years," he said. He said "a very small number" of ethnic Han Chinese chose to stay in Tibet but said they could not be regarded as immigrants.