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Xu Kuangdi, president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, has called for producers of traditional Chinese medicine to use modern technology and take the road to industrialization.

Xu, who is a former mayor of Shanghai, made this call at a Beijing forum on biomedicine.

China, the world's largest user of herbal medicine, has 12,807 medicinal herbs. The science of the traditional Chinese medicine has been practiced for over 2,200 years ago.

However, medicinal herbs are now being destroyed due to random production, which has severely affected their quantity and quality, according to the academician.

Almost 3,000 species of medicinal herbs, or 60-70 percent of those with medicinal properties, are in the danger of extinction.

In his speech, Xu also described the out-of-dated ways of manufacturing the traditional drugs.

In 1995, China's exports of traditional medicine peaked at 655 million US dollars and remained at approximately the same level for five years, he said.

While China has only a three-percent share of the world market, its neighbors, Japan and the Republic of Korea, have a quarter.