The improvement of education and health services in Tibet over the past 50 years is an undeniable fact and allows no misinterpretation, a Chinese ethnologist said on Saturday.

"It is groundless and untruthful for some Western media to say China has spent huge amounts on infrastructure construction at the expense of education and cultural services, and that might have led to the riots in Lhasa" Chuai Zhenyu, deputy director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview with the Economic Daily.

"Before the peaceful liberation, few people, except monks and aristocrats, were entitled to learn how to read and write, and 95 percent of Tibetans were illiterate," he said.