While the number may have increased this past year, as of June 2012 there are around 70,000 American’s in the Middle Kingdom:

There are about seventy thousand Americans living in mainland China today, according to the Chinese and US governments. A lot of the Americans in China only stay for a few years, but then there are others — American ex-pats who’ve lived in China for a decade or more with no foreseeable plans to come home. Who are they? And how Chinese do they become? Evan Osnos has this story, which starts with an ex-pat named Kaiser Kuo. Evan is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the column Letter from China.

From Chicago Public Media’s This American Life