A Southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to a federal charge alleging she acted as an agent of the Chinese government, US prosecutors said Monday.
Eileen Wang, who served as mayor of Arcadia, was charged in April with a single felony count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government, the US Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California said. The criminal charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. A 19‑page plea agreement was unsealed with the charging document on Monday.
Wang resigned from the mayoralty within hours after the case became public. She was elected to Arcadia’s five‑member city council in November 2022 and assumed the mayoral role last February as part of the council’s rotating schedule. Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb with roughly 53,000 residents, has a large Chinese‑American community.
According to the plea agreement, Wang and a colleague, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, promoted material favorable to the Chinese government between late 2020 and 2022 at the direction and control of Chinese officials. The pair operated a website called US News Center, which served the local Chinese‑language community, and prosecutors say they published pro‑China content on that site in response to directives from government contacts.
The court filing says some of the material published on the site disputed reports of persecution, forced labor and abuse of Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region. Sun previously pleaded guilty to the same charge in October 2025 and is serving a four‑year prison sentence.
Prosecutors also alleged Wang communicated with a Chinese Communist Party figure known as John Chen. Chen pleaded guilty earlier and was sentenced to 20 months in prison in 2024. The complaint and related filings note a broader enforcement effort in recent years targeting individuals accused of acting on Beijing’s behalf, including the 2024 conviction of Chinese‑American academic Wang Shujun for acting as a foreign agent and other cases involving alleged surveillance or intelligence collection on behalf of China.
Public records and campaign filings show Sun was listed as treasurer for Wang’s 2022 campaign and Wang at times publicly described Sun as her fiancé.
Wang, 68, made a brief appearance before a federal magistrate judge on Monday. Her attorneys, Jason Liang and Brian Sun, issued a statement saying she recognizes the seriousness of the charge, accepts responsibility for “past personal mistakes,” and apologizes for those errors. They said her commitment to the Arcadia community has not changed.
The court set bond at $25,000 (about €21,260). Wang and her lawyers were instructed to agree on a future date when she will formally enter her plea.
The case is one of several recent US prosecutions alleging clandestine influence or intelligence activity on behalf of the Chinese government and highlights growing scrutiny of Beijing’s efforts to shape opinion and collect information abroad.