The mayor of Arcadia, California, resigned and will plead guilty to a federal felony charge of acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government, federal prosecutors announced Monday. Eileen Wang, 58, was charged in April with one count of acting as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification to the U.S. government, as required by law.
According to her plea agreement, Wang and business associate Yaoning “Mike” Sun operated the news website U.S. News Center from the end of 2020 through 2022. The site, which targeted the Chinese American community, was used to publish content favorable to Beijing at the direction of officials from the People’s Republic of China. In one instance described by prosecutors, a Chinese government official sent Wang a link to a letter published in the Los Angeles Times by the consul general of the People’s Republic of China in Los Angeles; the letter denied the persecution and forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Wang posted the article on her news site within minutes.
Sun pleaded guilty to the same charge last October and is currently serving a four-year federal prison sentence. Campaign finance records list Sun as the treasurer of Wang’s 2022 election campaign.
Wang’s attorneys, Jason Liang and Brian Sun, said in a statement that she “recognizes the seriousness of the charge and accepts responsibility for past personal mistakes.” The statement noted that Wang had been engaged to Sun and that her “trust and love for apparently the wrong person ultimately led her astray.” Wang has said that the relationship ended in spring 2024.
Arcadia City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a release that no city finances or staff were involved. “We want to be clear: this investigation concerns individual conduct, and the charges are for conduct that ceased after Ms. Wang was sworn into office in December 2022,” Lazzaretto said.
Prosecutors also disclosed that Wang communicated with John Chen, another individual who pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for China and received a 20-month prison sentence.
Wang is expected to appear in federal court in downtown Los Angeles later Monday and formally enter her guilty plea in the coming weeks. The charge carries a maximum possible penalty of 10 years in prison. Arcadia, a city of roughly 53,000 residents about 13 miles northeast of Los Angeles, has a majority Asian population and a high concentration of Chinese residents.