BEIJING, Dec 3 (AFP) - China angrily condemned Tuesday the start of direct broadcasts to Tibet by the US government-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA).

This move by the US side is, in essence, aimed at further interference in other countries internal affairs by means of the media, a foreign ministry spokesman said Tuesday.

RFA began direct short-wave broadcasts to Tibet on Sunday, two months after debuting its radio service in Mandarin to China.

The 30-minute Tibetan-language broadcast first went out at 7:00 a.m. and was repeated the following half-hour with news updates. It was aired again at 9:00 p.m.

The broadcasts have seriously damaged the norms governing international relations ... and are not conducive to the improvement of Sino-US relations, the spokesman said.

We demand that the US government should not further meddle in other countries internal affairs under the veneer of freedom of speech, he added.

A government-funded private corporation, RFA is charged by Congress with broadcasting news and information in eight languages Mandarin, Tibetan, Cantonese, Burmese, Korean, Khmer, Laotian, and Vietnamese to Asia.

Three weeks after Mandarin broadcasts began, China's official media resumed their attack on RFA as a trick to violate the political and social stability of other countries.

Radio Free Asia had just better shut up, since the Asian people have become sick and tired of the endless harangue from America, the official China Daily said.

However, a leading Tibetan dissident group, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT), welcomed the new radio service to the Himalayan territory annexed by China in the 1950s.

This service will enable the people of Tibet to get much more information about events affecting Tibet which are currently denied to them by the official Chinese media, ICT president Lodi Gyari said.