BEIJING, Sept 9 (AFP) - German parliamentarians returning from a human rights mission to Tibet on Tuesday decried concealment and evasion by Chinese authorities during their four-day stay.

The visit was "totally set up," MP Gerd Poppe, a former dissident under East Germany, told reporters.

The delegates seven members of the parliamentary Foreign Relations sub-committee on Human Rights could not freely contact people, and their movements were highly restricted, he said.

The sub-committee chairman, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, said Chinese officials refused to discuss individual dissident cases raised by the group.

Although repeatedly asked about the status of the child picked by the Dalai Lama as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and his family, the officials refused to provide information, he said.

Gendun Choekyi Nyima still covertly recognised by many Tibetan Buddhists disappeared soon after Beijing inserted its own child candidate for Tibet's second-highest religious leader in May 1995.

"An eight-year-old boy shouldn't be allowed to be a pawn of national politics," said Schwarz-Schilling, a sinologist and former minister of posts and telecommunications.

"There is human rights deficit in Tibet, and we hope for a more open dialogue," he added.

Poppe said Chinese officials in Beijing and Tibet were inflexible during talks with the group. "I couldn't describe it as a dialogue ... it was more of a monologue," he said.

The officials repeatedly claimed not to have heard of high-profile dissidents such as imprisoned monks, he said, adding that they also denied knowledge of where Ngawang Choephel a US-based Tibetan musician sentenced to 18 years in jail for spying last December was imprisoned.

Sub-committee vice-chairman Volker Neumann said officials were willing to discuss judicial issues in terms of aggregate figures. They indicated that "so-called political prisoners" accounted for 11 percent of those detained in Tibet a rate 20 times as large as in the rest of China, he said.

But the parliamentarians said it was difficult to get a clear idea of Tibetan prison conditions based on their visit to a part of one facility.

It was clear from the behaviour of both guards and inmates that the latter had been instructed not to even look at, let alone talk to, the visitors, Poppe said, adding that it was a "bizarre scene."

Officials asked about torture gave contradictory answers, but items that could be used for the purpose were in clear evidence in the prison, the delegates said.

Schwarz-Schilling cited a "regrettable" trend towards a prevalence of Chinese language, rather than indigenous Tibetan, in the daily and political life of Lhasa, Tibet's capital.

But he also cautioned that development of human rights in China should be viewed as a long-term process, citing encouraging signs that ordinary Tibetans monks and nuns excepted seemed to enjoy more religious freedom than in his previous trips to the region.

Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, sparked a bilateral diplomatic crisis in June last year when it adopted a resolution criticising human rights abuses in Tibet.

Chinese troops seized control of Tibet in 1951, but the Dalai Lama did not flee the region until a failed anti-Chinese uprising eight years later.

Considered a separatist enemy of the state by Beijing, the spiritual leader has since headed a government-in-exile in India and campaigned peacefully for Tibetan self-determination.