'By her own admission, Eileen Wang secretly served the interests of the Chinese government,' FBI says.

Wang

By JASON HENRY AND DAVID WILSON | STAFF WRITERS

Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang resigned from the City Council on Monday after federal authorities charged her with acting as an agent of the Chinese government.

Wang, 58, is charged with one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. She will plead guilty in the coming weeks to the felony count, which comes with a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison, as part of a plea agreement.

Federal law requires foreign agents to notify the U.S. Attorney General.

Wang, along with Yaoning "Mike" Sun, 65, of Chino Hills, operated the U.S. News Center, a website claiming to be a news source for local Chinese Americans. From 2020 through 2022, Wang and Sun received and executed "directives" to post content on the website from government officials in the People's Republic of China.

Sun, who is Wang's former fiance and campaign adviser, is serving a four-year federal prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to the same charge in October. At one point, Sun surveilled the president of Taiwan during a visit to Southern California and sent pictures of protesters to his handlers, prosecutors said.

"The allegations at the center of this case, that a foreign government sought to exert influence over a local elected official, are deeply troubling," Arcadia City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a statement. "We take them seriously."

Arcadia Deputy City Manager Justine Bruno said that after Sun was arrested in December 2024, the city conducted an internal review.

"Based on that review, the City determined that no City finances, staff, or decision-making processes were impacted in any way," Bruno said in an email. In addition, Bruno said the charges against Wang stem from activities before her time in office.

"The City of Arcadia remains available to assist the FBI if requested, although no such request has been made," Bruno said. "No other members of the City Council are under investigation, and City services have continued without interruption."

Wang was elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022 and her term is set to expire in November. The City Council, which rotates the largely ceremonial position of mayor each year, plans to select a new mayor and to begin discussions about filling Wang's seat at its next meeting.

Prosecutors allege Chinese officials used WeChat, an encrypted messenger, to send Wang and others prewritten articles to post on the website, including one in 2021 that denied the existence of forced labor camps in the Xinjiang region.

That same year, the United States accused the PRC of detaining more than 1 million "Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Hui and members of other Muslim groups, as well as some Christians, in specially built internment camps or converted detention facilities" in the Xinjiang region and subjecting them to "forced disappearance, torture, other physical and psychological abuse, including forced sterilization and sexual abuse, forced labor, political indoctrination, and prolonged detention without trial because of their religion and ethnicity," according to the U.S. Department of State website.

Minutes after receiving the article denying the camps in Xinjiang, Wang posted it to the U.S. News Center's website and responded to the PRC official with a link. The official responded: "So fast, thank you everyone," according to prosecutors.

Later, Wang made edits to the article at the official's request and sent a screenshot showing it received 15,128 views. After she received praise, she wrote back: "Thank you leader."

Wang admitted in her plea agreement that she did not notify the attorney general that she was acting as an agent of the PRC and did not disclose on her website that some of the content had been posted at the direction of members of the PRC government, prosecutors said.

"By her own admission, Eileen Wang secretly served the interests of the Chinese government," said a statement from Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. "Let this serve as a clear warning: Individuals who act on behalf of foreign governments to influence our democracy will be identified, investigated and brought to justice."

The federal investigation found that Wang communicated with John Chen, a high-level member of the PRC's intelligence apparatus who regularly attended elite Chinese Communist Party functions and met personally with President Xi Jinping, according to court documents. Wang asked Chen to post a "news" article from her website, and wrote, "This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send," prosecutors alleged.

Chen received a 20-month prison sentence in November 2024 after pleading guilty to acting as an illegal agent and conspiracy to bribe a public official.

Residents called on Wang to resign after Sun's arrest in 2024. A probable cause affidavit filed in Sun's case alleged he and Chen monitored the election of a local official, identified then as "Individual 1," and submitted reports to Chinese officials

describing their work "cultivating and assisting in (Individual l's) success."

In a February 2023 draft report, Sun described his personal background and his history of working against "Chinese secessionist forces." Additionally, he boasted that "most proudly of all, during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, I orchestrated and organized my team to win the election for city council member candidate (Individual 1)."

Dennis Craig Wilder, a professor at Georgetown University and former senior U.S. intelligence official, told the Southern California News Group in 2024 that propping up campaigns was a classic tactic used by the PRC.

"Some call it the thousand grains of sand approach to intelligence activities and they do play the long game," he said. "They are willing to invest the resources in operations targeting young politicians that may not pay off for decades."

Wilder added that novice politicians often do not understand the espionage threat and therefore, are relatively easy to manipulate into pro-China activities that appear on the surface to be benign.

"There may well be hundreds of co-optees, like Sun, at the local levels seeking influence on behalf of the Communist Party," he said at the time.

Wang could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon. A number listed for her on the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder's list of November 2022 general election candidates went to voicemail.