By Ben Blanchard

BEIJING, March 29 (Reuters) - China will give more support to disadvantaged ethnic minorities to protect their culture and boost living standards, a minister said on Thursday, denying that the groups suffered discrimination.

More money would be pumped into education and health care in minority areas, which are often remote and poor, and special emphasis would be put on minority languages, said Dondrub Wangben, vice-minister of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission.

"Since the country began reforming and opening up, ethnic minorities have made rapid progress," he told a news conference. "But because of historical, environmental and social reasons, the development of ethnic affairs is still lagging.

"There is poorly coordinated economic and social development in minority areas, and fairly large gaps between different areas and rural and urban areas.

"This severely hinders the building of a harmonious society," the official added, referring to President Hu Jintao's oft-repeated goal of removing the causes of social tensions.

China officially has 56 ethnic groups, but more than 90 percent of the 1.3 billion population are Han Chinese.

Minorities range from the populous Manchu and Hui, who have largely assimilated into mainstream Chinese society, to the Shamanistic Ewenki people in the northeast and the tiny Lhoba group in Tibet, with only about 2,500 members.

But it is tensions between the Han and groups like the Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs -- some of whom would like independent homelands for their peoples -- which have generated the most publicity in recent years.

Dondrub Wangben, himself an ethnic Tibetan, played down these problems, saying the minorities generally got along very well, like "the 56 petals of a flower".

"If there were discrimination, how could I, from a poor background, have gone to school and now be sitting here giving this press conference?" he said.

Yet the government's planning document for developing minority areas up to 2010 talks of setting up an emergency mechanism for dealing with ethnic strife and cracking down on "separatism".

Beijing keeps a tight rein on its outlying regions, home to many minorities but also rich in energy and minerals and bordering sensitive countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Some exile groups, including those representing Tibetans and Mongolians, complain that this heavy-handedness has led to the repression of their languages and culture.

Dondrub Wangben said that was not the case, adding that the government believed bilingual education and protecting threatened languages such as Manchu -- the tongue of China's last emperors -- were vital to the country's cultural heritage.

"Culture is the soul of a people, and it is the root and the essence of a people," he said. "The culture of the different minorities is wealth, is life."

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