BEIJING, Nov 21 (Reuter) - The Communist Party chief in Tibet has vowed to boost patriotic education in the Himalayan region to battle foreign forces hostile to China and the influence of the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Patriotic education would be an important factor in battling hostile Western forces that sought to create chaos in Tibet, the Tibet Daily said in an edition seen in Beijing on Thursday.

"Unflaggingly carrying out patriotic education...and opposing the ideologicial infiltration of hostile Western forces and the Dalai Lama clique is an arduous and prominent task," the November 12 edition of the newspaper said, quoting party secretary Chen Kuiyuan.

Combatting the influence of Beijing's chief rival for Tibetan loyalties, the Dalai Lama, was a pressing task for the restive region, Chen said.

Chen accused Western media of spreading the Dalai Lama's plots to split Tibet from China.

"The struggle against 'westernisation' and 'splitting up' is present at every moment and will be present for a long time to come," he said.

Beijing suspects the West is playing the Tibet card to weaken, divide and contain China.

Ideological education was needed to fight religious thinking and separatist ideas that had penetrated Tibetan schools and threatened to gain control of the region's youth, Chen said.

"Teaching cadres, the masses and broad numbers of youth to passionately love the motherland and passionately love socialism is the primary task of ideological construction," Chen said.

Chen's speech appeared a day after the newspaper called for tighter controls on religion in Tibet and vowed to crack down on pro-independence monks and nuns.

The Dalai Lama, who fled his Himalayan homeland in 1959 after a failed uprising against communist rule, had draped himself in the cloak of religion to further his splittist aims, Chen said.

The Dalai Lama, widely revered in his homeland as a god-king, won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggle for autonomy for Tibet.

Chen said temples would be the battlefields in the fight against the Dalai Lama. He did not elaborate.

Beijing has repeatedly cracked down on monks and nuns in the deeply devout Buddhist region and accused the clergy of playing a major role in an underground Tibetan campaign against communist rule.

Tibet has been rocked by anti-Chinese protests by monks and nuns since the 1980s. Communist troops marched into Tibet in 1950.

The London-based watchdog group Tibet Information Network reported earlier this week that a jailed Tibetan nun had had her sentence doubled to 18 years for defying Beijing's choice of the reincarnation of the region's second holiest monk.

The party boss also warned that superstitious beliefs had made a recent comeback in the region because the Dalai Lama had used religion to drug the people.

Ugly religious practices had appeared again in wedding and funeral ceremonies and other aspects of social life, Chen said.

Religion had even taken root among some government officials and threatened to hinder the economic development of the backward and remote region, Chen said.

"These negative ideas and actions block the spread of science and technology and hinder the development of productive forces," he said.