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LOS ANGELES (CN) — The mayor of Arcadia, California, has agreed to plead guilty to working as an illegal agent for the People’s Republic of China, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced Monday.
Eileen Wang, 58, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government, which carries a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.
In her plea agreement, Wang said she, at the direction of Chinese officials, helped spread pro-China propaganda through a website, U.S. News Center, that purported to be a news source for the local Chinese American community. Wang and a previously convicted co-conspirator received instructions from Chinese officials to post pro-PRC content on their site.
She admitted in her plea agreement that in 2021, she posted, at the bidding of a Chinese government official, a prewritten article on the site that denied there was a genocide in Xinjiang and that there was no such thing as “forced labor” in cotton production in the autonomous region in northwestern China.
China has been widely criticized in recent years over its persecution of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. Uyghurs are the largest ethnic group in the region, are mostly Muslim and are ethnically Turkic like other populations in Central Asia. China has been accused of mass detention and torture of Uyghur people, using them as forced labor in the cotton industry and of trying to eradicate their ancient culture.
“Individuals in our country who covertly do the bidding of foreign governments undermine our democracy,” First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli said in a statement. “This plea agreement is the latest success in our determination to defend the homeland against China’s efforts to corrupt our institutions.”
Wang’s co-conspirator, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was sentenced to four years in prison in February. Sun, who served as Wang’s campaign manager ahead of her election to Arcadia’s City Council in 2022, also had pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for a foreign government.
Wang was elected in November 2022 to the Arcadia City Council, a five-person governing body from which the mayor is selected on a rotating basis.
Brian Sun, Wang’s attorney, said in a statement that the conduct that the criminal charge and plea agreement relate solely to Wang’s personal life — that is, a media platform that she once operated with someone whom, according to her attorney, she believed to be her fiancé and who led her astray— and not to her conduct as an elected public official.
“She apologizes and is sorry for the mistakes she has made in her personal life,” Sun said. “Her love and devotion for the Arcadia community have not changed and did not waver. She asks for the community’s understanding and continued support.”
Under federal law, it’s a crime to work in the U.S. at the direction of a foreign government without first notifying the attorney general.
Arcadia, in the San Gabriel Valley east of downtown LA, is one of several communities in Southern California that have seen an influx of Asian immigrants since the 1980s. Asian Americans made up 65% of the population in the city of about 56,000 in 2020, compared to just 4% in 1980.
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