The mayor of a Los Angeles suburb resigned Monday, as U.S. officials announced that she will plead guilty in federal court to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government.
Federal prosecutors announced Monday that Eileen Wang, 58, of Arcadia, Calif., has been charged with one count of acting in the U.S. as an illegal agent of a foreign government and is “expected to plead guilty in the coming weeks.” The charge is punishable with up to 10 years in prison.
“Mayor Wang admitted to acting as a foreign agent from at least 2020 through 2022 – promoting PRC propaganda in the U.S. and acting at PRC’s direction to promote their interests,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X. “FBI and our federal partners continue to move aggressively to root out this kind of influence in American institutions all over the country.”
Wang was elected in November 2022 to the five-member Arcadia City Council, where the mayor is selected on a rotating basis. City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a statement Monday that Wang, who became mayor in February, has resigned from the council.
“The allegations at the center of this case, that a foreign government sought to exert influence over a local elected official, are deeply troubling,” Lazzaretto said, though he clarified that the charge against Wang is for actions that ended after her swearing-in, and that, after an internal review, the council can confirm that no Arcadia City finances, staff, or decision-making processes were involved.
In a statement to the Courthouse News Service, Wang’s attorney Brian Sun said that the California politician “apologizes and is sorry for the mistakes she has made in her personal life,” adding: “Her love and devotion for the Arcadia community have not changed and did not waver.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a track record of attempting to influence other countries’ affairs to advance its interests. It has meddled in elections, targeted overseas Chinese dissidents, and conducted information and propaganda campaigns, according to government and journalistic reports.
“Individuals in our country who covertly do the bidding of foreign governments undermine our democracy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli in the Monday announcement, adding that the plea agreement Wang has entered into is “the latest success in our determination to defend the homeland against China’s efforts to corrupt our institutions.”
Here’s what to know.
Who is Eileen Wang?
Eileen Wang is a Chinese immigrant. According to a 2024 report in the Los Angeles Times, Wang said she moved to Southern California from China three decades ago. Wang told the paper that her mother was a Chinese medicine and acupuncture doctor, while her father was a physician in Sichuan province before working at the University of Southern California.
The LA Times report added that Wang, a mother of two, had been based in Arcadia for about two decades, and was mainly known for running an after-school program in the city called Little Stanford Academy before entering politics. About 59% of Arcadia’s 54,000 population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is Asian, while over 42% is ethnically Chinese.
Wang is the former fiancée of Yaoning “Mike” Sun, who was sentenced to four years in federal prison earlier this year for similarly acting as a covert agent for China, including, according to the U.S. Justice Department at the time, while he was serving as a campaign adviser for an unnamed candidate “who was elected to the city council of a Southern California city.” Sun was Wang’s former campaign adviser.
Wang’s case
The charge against Wang was filed on April 1, but court filings, including the plea agreement Wang entered into, were unsealed on Monday.
According to the unsealed plea agreement, from late 2020 through at least 2022, Wang “coordinated with U.S.-based individuals” for the purpose of “promoting pro-PRC propaganda in the United States.”
Wang is alleged to have worked with Sun, her then-fiancé, to run a website called U.S. News Center that purported to be a news source for Chinese-Americans. According to the agreement, the two “received and executed directives” from Chinese government officials to post and circulate pro-PRC content on the site.
The document cites examples. In June 2021, after a Chinese government official contacted Wang and other individuals via messaging platform WeChat about a pre-written essay on Xinjiang, she posted it on her site and received a “thank you” from the official. In August, Wang addressed a Chinese official’s request for edits to the article; then she sent the official a screenshot of the number of views that article had amassed. After the official replied, “Great!” Wang allegedly responded: “Thank you leader.”
In November 2021, Wang communicated with John Chen, who was sentenced in November 2024 to 20 months in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government in the U.S. and bribing a tax authority agent. Chen, according to court documents, previously attended high-level CCP functions, and had personally met Chinese President Xi Jinping. The plea agreement said that Wang asked Chen to share an article from her website, saying, “This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send.”
Wang admitted in the plea agreement that she did not notify the Attorney General that she was acting in the U.S. as an agent of China, as is required by law, and that she did not disclose that content posted on her website were based on orders from Chinese authorities.
Chinese espionage
The FBI’s website says that China employs “tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable” to them and called counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts from the Chinese government and the CCP a “grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.”
In 2025, the House Committee on Homeland Security issued a report that found more than 60 cases of Chinese espionage or repression in the U.S. since 2021, including sending sensitive U.S. military information to the Chinese government, stealing trade secrets, and carrying out transnational repression schemes including setting up undercover Chinese police stations–which it has reportedly done worldwide.
In April, the White House also accused China of stealing on an “industrial scale” the intellectual property of U.S. artificial intelligence labs, as both countries race to become global leaders of AI. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R, Iowa) said in a statement last month that China steals between $400 billion and $600 billion of IP yearly, or about $5,000 per taxpayer.
China has routinely refuted interference, espionage, and theft accusations. It also denied that it had overseas police stations that collect information on and harass Chinese dissidents living in the U.S. and elsewhere, claiming instead that it had service centers for citizens abroad.
The post California Mayor Resigns, Admitting to Being an Agent for China appeared first on TIME.
