By JOHN LEICESTER

BEIJING Sep 30 (AP) -- Two Chinese dissidents dared the government Monday to grant Tibetans the right of self-determination and to talk to Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama.

The appeal from Liu Xiaobo and Wang Xizhe was likely to anger China's Communist leadership, which keeps a tight grip over the Himalayan region it claims has been part of China for 700 years.

Liu and Wang, both of whom have spent time in jail for their political activism, made their appeals in a sometimes caustically worded petition faxed to The Associated Press by a Hong Kong-based human rights group. In telephone interviews, Wang and Liu confirmed the petition's authenticity.

"The Chinese government has made mistakes in Tibet, especially since the Cultural Revolution," Wang said, referring to the 1966-76 radical political movement when Chinese youths destroyed thousands of Tibetan temples.

In the petition addressed to the Communist Party's Central Committee, Liu and Wang accused the Communists of going back on pledges made before they came to power in 1949 that China's ethnic minorities should have the right to self-determination and even "the right to set up an independent country."

"This way of doing things and style of work has continued to the present day. It is wrong and is a major reason why the Communist Party has ultimately lost popular support," said the petition released by the Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China.

China routinely suppresses Tibetan calls for independence and greater freedoms. It also accuses the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet after a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959, of destabilizing the region by appealing for greater autonomy.

While they did not want to see China divided, Wang and Liu said the Han Chinese majority should not "deny the right to self-determination of each ethnic minority."

Wang is one of China's earliest democracy campaigners, having been in and out of jail since putting up a poster in southern Canton city in 1974.

Liu, a former history lecturer at Beijing's Teachers College, helped lead a hunger strike during Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He served two years in jail and has been detained several times since then.