Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) is a treasure of Chinese medical science, and it has been widely applied in the prevention and treatment of disease at home for century.Owing to the reasons that the gradient of TCM is complex and the mechanism of drug efficiency is not clear,the process of modernization and internationalization for TCM has been restricted seriously.With the advantages of high sensitivity,high selectivity,high stability and high-throughput,mass spectrometric(MS) technology is especially suitable for the qualification and quantitation of complex components and their metabolites in TCM.In this paper,the typical application research of MS technology in composition identification and quality control,metabolomics and pharmacokinetics of TCM study in recent years are reviewed,and the problems existed and the improvements are discussed.