By Jane Macartney

BEIJING, Sept 1 (Reuter) - China congratulated itself on the 30th anniversary of formal rule over the rebellious region of Tibet on Friday and issued a new blistering attack on the Dalai Lama, accusing him of fomenting unrest.

A group of nine Tibetan women exiles, their mouths gagged with colourful scarves to represent repression in their Himalayan homeland, staged a daring and unprecedented silent protest on Friday at the international women's forum in Beijing.

"Our women in Tibet are denied the freedom of expression," said demonstrator Dorjil Carroll. "We are protesting against that (Chinese rule)."

Beijing's Communist Party rulers will crush any attempt by the exiled Dalai Lama, regarded as a god-king in the deeply Buddhist region, to split Tibet from China, Vice Premier Wu Bangguo told a meeting in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on Thursday.

The official media railed at the Dalai Lama while extolling progress wrought by 30 years of formal rule, including annual per capita income of 817 yuan ($98) for herdsmen, and saying communism had replaced butter-fuelled lamps and cow dung with hydro power.

"Recently, the Dalai Lama clique has made attempts to split Tibet off from the motherland using religion as the means," the People's Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist Party, said in a lengthy front page editorial.

It stressed the role of the Dalai Lama in a new explosive row embroiling Beijing and the god-king, who sparked China's fury in May by naming a six-year-old Tibetan boy as the 11th incarnation of the Panchen Lama, a senior cleric, replacing the one who died in 1989.

"They want to create disorder by taking advantage of the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama," the newspaper said.

Beijing has branded the move illegal and void on the grounds senior lamas must be vetted by China, a custom it says dates back to 1792.

"Our struggle against the Dalai clique is a continuous series of battles," it said.

Beijing regularly lashes out at the Dalai Lama, accusing him of fomenting Tibetan independence and stirring up anti-Chinese sentiment to try to split China since he fled to India in 1959 after an abortive anti-Chinese uprising.

People's Liberation Army troops entered Tibet in 1950 and Beijing solidified its rule over Tibet in 1965 by setting up the ostensibly autonomous government.

China's most senior veteran Tibet official, Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, said a nine-year delay from 1956 to 1965 in setting up Chinese rule was to blame on "splittists who supported imperalist systems and by a ruling class that aimed to maintain their slave system."

Writing in the People's Daily, much of which was devoted to celebrating the 30th anniversary, he said Chinese rule had enabled the population of the remote region to expand.

"The ruling class used religion to reduce the population by asking most Tibetan people to become monks and not to marry," he wrote.

Since the late 1980s Chinese troops and police have quashed numerous anti-Chinese uprisings, usually led by lamas loyal to the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

China has pushed hard to modernise Tibet and graft it on to the Chinese motherland but many Tibetans resent Chinese rule and separatist, anti-Chinese sentiment still simmers.