BEIJING, Oct. 20 (AP) -- China has opened 206 methadone clinics over the past four months in a campaign to combat heroin addiction and reduce the spread of the AIDS virus by addicts sharing needles, a news report said Friday.

The new outlets bring the number of methadone clinics to 307, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It didn't give locations but said they now covers two-thirds of China's 31 provinces and regions.

Methadone is a synthetic narcotic that is given to addicts who are trying to break their heroin habit.

About 40 percent of people in China with the AIDS virus trace it to sharing needles for injecting heroin, according to the government's National Narcotics Control Commission.

The number of known addicts in China rose 35 percent 1.2 million in 2000-05, according to the government. That included 700,000 heroin users, more than two-thirds of them under age 35.

Addiction rates are high in Chinese border areas near Southeast Asia's heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Thailand, Myanmar and Laos, where the drug is cheap and plentiful.

China's communists nearly wiped out drug addiction after the 1949 revolution, executing traffickers and confining addicts to treatment centers. But the trade has flourished amid looser social controls in the past two decades.