U.S. News
Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang Admits She Was a Chinese Government Agent. Here’s What She Actually Did.
By Mike Harper · May 13, 2026
On a June day in 2021, a Chinese government official sent Eileen Wang a WeChat message containing a pre-written essay. The article pushed back against Los Angeles Times reporting on human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The official wanted it distributed.
Within minutes, Wang posted it on her website. She sent the official a link. Later, she sent him a screenshot showing the article had been read 15,128 times.
The official responded: “Great!”
Wang typed back: “Thank you leader.”
On Monday, Wang — who is the mayor of Arcadia, California, a city of 53,000 in the San Gabriel Valley 13 miles northeast of Los Angeles — resigned from her position and agreed to plead guilty to a federal felony charge of acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China. She faces up to ten years in prison. She appeared in federal court Monday afternoon and was released on a $25,000 bond.
The charge, and the plea agreement unsealed Monday, describe an operation that ran from late 2020 through 2022 — and that continued, prosecutors say, while Wang was campaigning to become the first Chinese-American woman elected to the Arcadia City Council. She won in November 2022. The plea agreement covers conduct that occurred before her election, and city officials said Monday that no city finances or staff were involved in the scheme.
The operation worked like this: Wang and her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun — who is already serving a four-year federal sentence for the same offense — operated a website called U.S. News Center, which presented itself as a news source for the local Chinese American community. In reality, Wang and Sun received directives from Chinese government officials via WeChat telling them what to post, when to post it, and how to frame it. They distributed pro-Beijing propaganda, suppressed coverage of human rights abuses, and reported back engagement metrics — view counts, shares, audience reach — to their handlers.
In November 2021, Wang communicated directly with John Chen, described in court documents as a high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus who had met personally with President Xi Jinping. Wang asked Chen to post an article from her website. Chen’s sentence — 20 months — was handed down in November 2024 after he pleaded guilty to acting as a PRC agent and conspiracy to bribe a public official.
FBI Director Kash Patel posted on social media Monday: “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.”
Wang’s attorneys issued a statement Monday that attempted to frame the conduct as a personal mistake rather than a deliberate intelligence operation. “Events in Ms. Wang’s personal life — including her trust and love for apparently the wrong person who ultimately led her astray — require her to step away from public service,” the statement read. “She apologizes and is sorry for the mistakes she has made in her personal life.”
The plea agreement and court documents do not characterize it as a mistake. They characterize it as a coordinated influence operation executed over two years, with specific directives, specific deliverables, and specific reporting back to handlers in the PRC government.
Arcadia will select a new mayor at the next City Council meeting. Wang has not announced what she plans to do before sentencing.