Arcadia mayor resigns after federal foreign-agent plea deal

Eileen Wang resigned as Arcadia mayor after federal prosecutors said she agreed to plead guilty to acting illegally as an agent of the Chinese government inside the United States. The 58-year-old Arcadia resident was charged by information with one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government, a felony that carries a statutory maximum of 10 years in federal prison.

City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said Wang resigned from the Arcadia City Council and vacated the mayor’s office after the charges were announced. Wang had been elected to the five-member council in November 2022, and Arcadia’s mayor is chosen on a rotating basis by the council, giving the case unusual reach inside a city hall that had already elevated her into ceremonial leadership.

According to prosecutors, Wang and her now-former fiancé and political associate Yaoning “Mike” Sun operated U.S. News Center from late 2020 through 2022 as a purported news outlet for Chinese-American readers. Federal officials say the site functioned instead as part of an undisclosed influence operation that circulated material favorable to Beijing and followed direction from officials in the People’s Republic of China. Prosecutors say Wang never registered with the U.S. attorney general as a foreign agent, as federal law requires.

The alleged coordination ran through encrypted WeChat chats and pre-written articles. In June 2021, a PRC official contacted Wang and others with articles, including a piece in the Los Angeles Times that argued against allegations of genocide in Xinjiang. Prosecutors say Wang then posted material responding to the Xinjiang issue. In August 2021, a PRC official praised edits she had made, saying “Great!”, and Wang replied, “Thank you leader.”

The Justice Department also says Wang messaged John Chen in November 2021 and asked him to post an article from her website. Prosecutors describe Chen as a high-level member of PRC intelligence who attended elite Communist Party functions and met personally with Xi Jinping. Sun pleaded guilty in October 2025 and was sentenced on February 9, 2026, to 48 months in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of the PRC, including while serving as a campaign adviser for a Southern California city council candidate.

Arcadia’s demographics make the case especially resonant. The city of 56,681 is majority Asian, with the Census Bureau estimating that 59.0% of residents identify as Asian alone and 61.1% of people age 5 and older speak a language other than English at home. Federal prosecutors and the FBI framed the case as a counterintelligence warning with implications far beyond Arcadia, where local political access, Chinese-language community media and municipal trust intersected with a foreign influence effort that authorities say went undetected for years.