Ex-California mayor Eileen Wang pleads guilty to acting as China agent

A former Southern California mayor pleaded guilty on Friday to acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. Eileen Wang, who stepped down as the mayor of Arcadia earlier this month, was charged in April with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She pleaded guilty to doing the bidding of Chinese officials by sharing articles favourable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 56-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected on a rotating basis.

Federal prosecutors say Wang’s illegal conduct occurred from late 2020 to 2022. Arcadia city officials and Wang’s lawyers have said it ended before she took office. Arcadia is located about 21km (13 miles) northeast of Los Angeles. The city of about 53,000 is majority Asian and has a high concentration of Chinese residents.

Wang appeared in downtown LA federal court to enter her plea. The hearing included procedural questions from US District Judge Wesley Hsu to ensure Wang understood her rights and the consequences of her guilty plea. A Chinese interpreter was present but Wang said she did not need their help. Wang was allowed to remain out on a US$25,000 bond until her sentencing on October 6.

She faces up to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release. According to her plea agreement, Wang and her fiancé at the time, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, worked on behalf of government officials for the People’s Republic of China by promoting their propaganda on a website called US News Centre. Sun is serving a four-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to the same charge last October. He was also listed in campaign filings as the treasurer for Wang’s 2022 election campaign.

In one instance in June 2021, a government official sent Wang a link to a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times written by the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles. The piece refuted reports of the persecution, forced labour and abuse of Uygurs, the Turkic ethnic minority, in China’s Xinjiang province, stating: “There has never been genocide in Xinjiang or forced labour in the region’s cotton fields or any other sector.” Within minutes, Wang shared the link on her website. The US and several other countries have declared that Beijing’s policies against the Uygurs amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. At the time, Wang was engaged to Sun, her lawyers said.

She has said that relationship ended in spring 2024. A statement they released after her resignation references “her trust and love for apparently the wrong person who ultimately led her astray”.

Residents and former Arcadia elected officials have said Wang should have been asked to resign after she came under FBI investigation for Sun’s case. Acting mayor Paul Cheng said he and other councilmembers’ hands were tied at the time. The city charter empowers them to remove a fellow councilmember only if they have been convicted of a crime, he said, which Wang had not at the time. “If there is a federal investigation that is in place, we are not investigators and to politicise an issue only impacts whatever federal investigation is out there,” Cheng said.