WASHINGTON, April 24 (Reuter) - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Dalai Lama agreed on Thursday on the importance of strong relations between the United States and China, the State Department said.

Albright, the first secretary of state to meet Tibet's exiled political and spiritual leader, reiterated the Clinton administration's support "for the preservation of Tibetan religion and culture and for dialogue between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama or his representative to resolve differences," the department said.

"The secretary and the Dalai Lama agreed on the importance of strong U.S.-China relations," Nicholas Burns, the department's chief spokesman, added in a statement.

The Dalai Lama, who won the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize for his peaceful campaign for Tibetan autonomy, has been in exile since an abortive 1959 uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet.

Albright, eager to minimise the risk of angering Beijing over U.S. contacts with the Tibetan leader, followed President Bill Clinton's diplomatic lead. Rather than scheduling a one-on-one meeting, she joined the Dalai Lama at a meeting with members of her advisory panel on religous freedom abroad.

China said on Thursday it had complained to the United States for allowing the Dalai Lama to meet Clinton and other U.S. leaders this week, but stopped short of saying the meetings would harm improving ties.

"We are strongly dissatisfied with the United States for allowing the Dalai Lama to carry out splittist activities in the United States, and with U.S. leaders for meeting him," Foreign Ministry spokesman Cui Tiankai said.

"We have already expressed our serious and principled stance to the U.S. side," Cui told a regular news briefing.

Clinton ignored Chinese warnings not to meet the Dalai Lama and told him at the White House on Wednesday he would urge China to open a direct dialogue with him.

"We express our adamant opposition to any actions that tolerate or support the Dalai Lama's activities to split the motherland," Cui said. Beijing's response was muted compared with its reaction to a similar meeting between Clinton and the Dalai Lama in September 1995, when China summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires to deliver a strong protest.

Clinton, wary of derailing the new Sino-U.S. rapprochement, stopped short of an Oval Office meeting, instead joining talks between the visiting Tibetan spiritual leader and Vice President Al Gore.

Nevertheless, backers of the Dalai Lama were delighted by the latest White House reception, not least by the release of pictures with Clinton. In previous years the White House kept photographers away.

Burns said the secretary of state's advisory panel discussed China's repression of Tibetan Buddhists and conditions of Moslems, Catholics and Evangelicals.

"Committee members expressed their deep commitment to ending religious persecution in Tibet, including incidents of torture and arbitrary arrests of Tibetan nuns and monks as well as the destruction of religious sites and restrictions on religious expression, education and worship," he said.