BEIJING (Reuter) - China has jailed a Tibetan music expert touring the Himalayan region on a U.S. scholarship for 18 years for spying in one of the harshest sentences ever meted out in the restive region, local radio reported Friday.

Ngawang Choephel, 30, who was traveling in Tibet as a Fulbright scholar to produce an amateur documentary about traditional music and dance, was detained by the authorities in Tibet in August, 1995, said the broadcast monitored by the British Broadcasting Corp.

The young scholar confessed to having been sent to Tibet by "the Dalai (Lama) clique" on behalf of an unnamed foreign country to conduct espionage activities, the report said in a thinly veiled reference to the United States.

The State Department said it was "quite concerned" by the report but that it knew nothing of the scholar's activities outside making a documentary. It also said he had not been traveling as a Fulbright scholar at the time of his arrest.

The Chinese radio broadcast said he was visiting "under the pretext of collecting information on Tibetan folk songs and dances."

"In accordance with the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China... The Intermediate People's Court of Xigaze Prefecture sentenced Ngawang Choephel to an 18-year prison term for committing espionage crime," the radio said.

He was deprived of his political rights for four years.

China has been swift to crack down on any sign of anti-Chinese unrest in the Himalayan region.

Beijing has been especially nervous about anyone with possible links to the exiled Dalai Lama, Tibet's god-king, since he announced in 1995 his own candidate as the reincarnation of the region's second holiest monk, the Panchen Lama. China later presided over the discovery of an alternative reincarnation.

"The striking thing is the length of the sentence," Robbie Barnett of the London-based group Tibet Information Network said in a telephone interview. "It is quite extraordinary."

Ngawang Choephol's sentence was the most severe handed down in a political case since Tibetan monk Ngawang Phulchung was jailed for 19 years in 1989 for subversion after publishing political leaflets, including a manifesto for a democratic Tibet.

Another monk, Jampel Changchup, was also sentenced in 1989 to 19 years in prison for subversion and espionage.

"It does seem to be a provocative decision in political terms because it names three times 'a certain foreign government'," Barnett said.

"It appears to mean the end of any sense that China is susceptible to the international community on human rights issues," he said. "They now feel confident to use counter-espionage laws against political offenders."

Ngawang Choephol left Tibet as a child shortly after the Chinese takeover in 1950 and grew up in India before going to Middlebury College in Vermont in 1993 as a Fulbright scholar in ethnomusicology.

The young man, who once worked as a dance teacher in India, travelled to Tibet in 1995 to make his amateur documentary.

To gain permission to travel to his birthplace, Ngawang Choephol renounced his Indian refugee status and entered Tibet as a Chinese citizen, Barnett said.

He was last reported to have been seen in Nyari prison in Xigaze, Tibet's second largest city in the west of the Himalayan region, in September 1995, shortly after his arrest in the local market.

"It is very unlikely that he was a spy," said Barnett. "He was genuinely making the film he said he was making. No one would have entrusted him to do this because he was not competent to carry out any hidden activities.

"He is a rather distracted, emotional artist," he said.