In 2022, Eileen Wang was running a Chinese propaganda website in the city of Arcadia, about twenty kilometers from Los Angeles. She resigned and was indicted.
Eileen Wang, mayor since 2022 of a suburb of Los Angeles called Arcadia, was indicted in April for acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government between 2020 and 2022, as reported by CNN. She pleaded guilty, while resigning from her position. Eileen Wang admitted to acting at the request of Chinese officials, particularly by sharing favorable articles about Beijing without prior notification to the American government, as required by law.
Together with her colleague Yaoning Sun, she managed the U.S. News Center information website aimed at the Chinese-American community. According to CNN, Chinese officials had requested them to publish content favorable to the People’s Republic of China.
CNN mentioned in June 2021 an incident where a Chinese government official asked Eileen Wang to repost a letter from a reader written by a consul general from the People’s Republic of China and published in the Los Angeles Times on her website. The letter refuted information about persecutions, forced labor, and abuses against the Uighurs in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, stating that “there has never been genocide in Xinjiang or forced labor in the region’s cotton fields or in any other sector.” CNN reported that Eileen Wang shared the article link on her information website. Nevertheless, the United States has declared Beijing’s policies towards the Uighurs as genocide and crimes against humanity.
According to the Times, the former mayor of Arcadia also communicated with John Chen, a Chinese spy living in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice presents him as a “high-ranking member of Chinese intelligence services” who “regularly attended prestigious receptions of the Chinese Communist Party.” John Chen was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison in 2024 after pleading guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China in the United States.
Eileen Wang moved from China to California 30 years ago, according to CNN. The head of the Arcadia city council stated in a press release that no other staff members were involved. “We want to be clear: this investigation concerns individual actions, and the charges relate to events that ended after Ms. Wang took office in December 2022.” Her lawyers stated in a press release that she acknowledged the seriousness of the allegations against her and took responsibility for her “past personal mistakes.”
