A guilty plea by a California mayor has exposed Beijing’s campaign to use domestic elections as a way to shape political outcomes in the United States, and experts warn that the threat will only deepen.
Eileen Wang, mayor of Arcadia, California, was charged with acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Department of Justice said on May 11.
She agreed to plead guilty to the felony count and faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison, according to the Justice Department. Wang resigned from office the same day.
Ken Wu, vice president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, said China will continue targeting U.S. city and county leaders as primary infiltration objectives, operating with enough caution to avoid detection in many cases.
“The U.S. political system grants immense leeway to local governments, and city council members wield considerably more authority than outsiders might expect,” Wu said.
“Beijing zeros in on this freedom, drawing local officials into its orbit to establish a political foothold and influence domestic policy from the grassroots level.”
Wang and a partner, Sun Yaoning, ran a website called U.S. News Center, posing as a local news outlet for the Chinese American community while publishing pro-Beijing content at the direction of Chinese regime officials, the department said.
Sun pleaded guilty in October 2025 and is serving a four-year federal prison sentence.
Wang was elected to the Arcadia City Council in November 2022 and was mayor when federal charges were filed. The mayoralty rotates among the council’s five members.
Wang’s attorneys said in an earlier emailed statement to The Epoch Times that she is “sorry for the mistakes she has made in her personal life.”
“Her trust and love for apparently the wrong person who ultimately led her astray—require her to step away from public service,” the statement reads.
Wang faces up to 10 years in prison, a three-year period of supervised release, and at least $250,000 in fines.
“The FBI is dedicated to rooting out those illegally acting as agents of a foreign government as they do the bidding of America’s adversaries,” said Patrick Grandy, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office.
‘Stark Warning’
Frank Tian Xie, a business and marketing professor at the University of South Carolina–Aiken, said the case is a “stark warning” to U.S. society that rival powers are increasingly seeking to shape domestic political outcomes.
“This means the threat from the Chinese regime is no longer just across the Pacific, but at our doorstep,” Xie told The Epoch Times.
“Recent examples, such as a Chinese police station in New York City, show the depth of Beijing’s infiltration of the [United States].”
Xie referred to the case of Lu Jianwang, a Chinese American convicted on May 13 in Brooklyn Federal Court of acting as a CCP agent by operating a secret Chinese police station in New York City.
Wu said Wang’s actions show how Beijing exploits the United States to cultivate a network of operatives across the country.
“The CCP abuses the inclusivity of the U.S. political system, taking advantage of its non-discriminatory environment to recruit people of Chinese origin as proxies,” Wu told The Epoch Times.
“Based on this pattern, Wang is far from the only asset to have embedded herself in U.S. institutions.”
Exploiting System
The timeline from Sun’s confession in 2025 to Wang’s guilty plea in 2026 highlights the extensive legal protections the United States grants the accused, creating a systemic buffer that routinely allows Beijing’s infiltrators to evade accountability, Wu said.
“This is the CCP’s most cunning tactic: They understand the [United States] operates on the rule of law and procedural justice, and they weaponize this framework to expand their influence in the country,” he said. “While U.S. judicial and national security agencies work through their investigations, these agents use the process to cover their tracks and weaken the political system.”
The United States has not faced such massive foreign subversion since its founding, a reality that has exposed vulnerabilities in existing law and fueled broader public distrust toward the CCP, according to Xie.
“The regime’s behavior on the international stage has already reduced Americans’ willingness to invest in or travel to China,” Xie said. “But the incident also reveals flaws in the U.S. democratic system, which I believe the government will quickly close to prevent a recurrence.”
CCP’s Primary Infiltration Objectives
Xie warned that as the Chinese regime considers a dominant United States a fundamental threat to its survival, it will employ an ever-broader range of schemes to undermine American society as competition between the two nations escalates.
“Beijing will keep using ‘unrestricted warfare’ to sway U.S. elections and continue co-opting united front targets from within Chinese American communities,” Xie said.
“Unrestricted warfare” is a doctrine central to the CCP’s geostrategic thinking, in which war is treated as broad and flexible, extending well beyond conventional military action.
Xie said identifying those working on Beijing’s behalf is difficult, and prosecuting them is harder still, a challenge that will increasingly burden Washington.
Wu said the CCP will also combine its technological capabilities with espionage efforts, seeking to shape U.S. democracy at scale.
“Through artificial intelligence and big data, Chinese cloud servers have accumulated vast stores of information on everyday life at the grassroots level in the [United States],” Wu said. “That data will be weaponized against democracy itself. Cognitive warfare will only intensify, and Washington cannot afford to overlook this threat.”
Troy Myers contributed to this report.
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