When Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang abruptly quit her high-powered job on the same day a plea agreement she made with the feds admitting to being a Chinese spy was unsealed, her wild confession made national headlines. But Wang is just a small cog in spy games that have a stranglehold in the affluent San Gabriel Valley city nicknamed the “Chinese Beverly Hills.” A ‘Los Angeles’ investigation shows that the Chinese government’s covert operations have roots well beyond City Hall that include money laundering, misinformation peddling and spying on Chinese dissidents.
On May 11, Eileen Wang, a rising star in California’s Democratic circles, made an abrupt announcement that rocked the affluent San Gabriel Valley city of Arcadia, where she had been sworn in as the city’s Mayor just months earlier. She was resigning, effective immediately, an announcement that came a day before President Trump’s trip to Beijing for a meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping.
A month earlier she had made a shocking admission to federal prosecutors in California’s Central District, and her plea deal was about to become public. Wang had been a politician since she was elected to the City Council in 2022, with the help of a campaign manager named Yaoning “Mike” Sun, who was also her then romantic partner. She became Mayor as part of Arcadia’s system of rotating councilmembers into the top seat.
Now, she is the only elected official in the United States who has been convicted on charges of being a covert agent for China.
For years, Wang has now admitted to federal investigators, she had been clandestinely working as an operative for the People’s Republic of China, a cunning longtime adversary of United States interests, by pushing propaganda on a website she ran alongside her one-time fiancé and campaign advisor Mike Sun. The city manager immediately released a statement telling Arcadians who live in the upscale suburb located roughly 13 miles from Downtown Los Angeles that the allegations involving Arcadia’s top public official were “deeply troubling.” Even more troubling, however, a Los Angeles magazine investigation has found, is Wang’s work for America’s political adversary is not the only influence the Chinese government has exerted in Arcadia.
The city, Los Angeles has learned, is also at the center of an ongoing undercover international intelligence sting codenamed “Project Sleeping Giant” that has uncovered deep, illicit alliances between the Sinaloa Cartel and Chinese money laundering networks that have long operated in Southern California around the fentanyl trade. Another investigation dubbed “Operation Fortune Runner” led to 2024 indictments in Los Angeles of two dozen cartel members and their Chinese money laundering partners, many of whom stand accused of using the San Gabriel Valley as the hub of its operation.
“We are under attack,” Ray Donovan, the retired DEA chief of operations, recently told Congress in testimony about what he called the alarming “speed and effectiveness Chinese criminal organizations exhibited in partnering with Mexican transnational criminal organizations to assume control of the fentanyl distribution and money laundering trades.” The networks are not just criminal outfits profiting off pain and addiction, Donovan testified. He asserts that fentanyl is a strategy to undermine the United States and is something that is heavily supported by the Chinese government making it, he says, “a genuine threat to our national security.”
Prosecutors note Wang is not connected to some of the other Chinese-government shenanigans that have been uncovered by federal prosecutors in Arcadia.
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How and why Wang became central to a Chinese espionage operation is not entirely clear. But whatever Wang was doing by propping up Chinese Communist Party information at the direction of Beijing, it was in direct opposition to the message she gave to her new constituents when she was sworn in as Mayor of Arcadia on Feb. 3.
“As Americans, and especially as elected officials, our loyalty must always be clear,” she said, “to this country, to our constitution, to our residents, and to no one else.”
Tutor, mother, covert agent
Eileen Wang immigrated to Southern California from her birthplace of Chengdu, China in 1995 — when she was in her late 20s — with her parents, who had both been medical professionals in China’s Sichuan province. Little is known about her early years as an immigrant. At some point she married, and apparently divorced, a local businessman named Henry Wang and had two sons. Education, though, was her business. She ran an after-school tutoring business for Chinese-speaking children called the Little Stanford Academy (how much of what she taught was being directed by the PRC is a question that has not been answered) and ran a separate entity known simply as Tutorial Services. Her political career was launched initially as a member of the Camino Elementary School’s Parent Teacher Association, and she soon met Mike Sun. The couple founded the American Southwest Chamber of Commerce, which gave them credibility in the business community of Arcadia.
Wang and her fiancé Sun, a former officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army — which is the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party — operated a fake news website called U.S. News Center that was aimed at the Chinese diaspora who occupy a large number of the tony mansions in picturesque Arcadia and the entire San Gabriel Valley, a region home to over half a million Asian Americans — more than in Chicago, San Francisco or even Los Angeles. Only, Wang admitted in her plea agreement, the stories that they posted were controlled narratives that came directly from Chinese intelligence officials. One of those operatives was Riverside County resident John Chen, a Chinese national who prosecutors now call “a high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus.” He had maintained relationships in his motherland that included Communist Party leaders and even President Xi Jinping, who he had been photographed with, according to federal court records.
With the success of the U.S. News Center, Chen and Sun came up with an even more audacious plan, according to court records. They put together a team to “help elect a politician…to political office.” That politician, they plotted, would be positioned in a powerful place to ramp up “promoting pro-PRC propaganda in the United States,” all while spying on Chinese dissidents.
With that, Sun launched Eileen Wang for Arcadia City Council 2022, listing himself on campaign finance reports as the treasurer. The couple were living together with Sun acting as a stand-in father to her boys.
When Wang was elected to the City Council in District 3, Sun celebrated the win with a report he would send to his handlers in China, federal prosecutors say, calling her a “new political star.” With his soon-to-be bride holding office, Sun, according to court records, became more brazen in his activities for China, and took meticulous notes of how he was helping his homeland that were later sent in a report to his PRC handlers. In it, Sun wrote about his work spying on the President of Taiwan during her 2023 visit to California, and “most of all” his efforts getting Wang elected.
He wasn’t wrong. By 2024, Wang was being celebrated by Democratic power players, including California Congresswoman Judy Chu, who awarded Wang a “Woman of the Year” citation in April 2024. Months later, in mid-December, Sun was hit with a federal indictment charging him with acting as an “illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China,” while running Wang’s campaign.
The news ended the couple’s relationship. But not Wang’s career. Not yet, at least.
Credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons via Mike0886
Spies, Lies & Pols
There is a long record of Chinese intelligence penetration of political networks in California. Former Congressman Eric Swalwell was accused of sleeping with a Chinese operative who volunteered on his federal campaign named Christine Fang, who has since fled the country. The reputed affair cost him his spot on the House Intelligence Committee, but he stayed in office until a cascade of allegations, which he steadfastly denies, came from women who say he sexually assaulted them. He ended his bid to replace California Governor Gavin Newsom, and resigned his seat in the House in April.
The late longtime California Senator Dianne Feinstein was forced to fire her longtime driver, Russell Lowe, who was friendly with Fang, after the FBI briefed the politico that he was a Chinese spy in 2018. By then, Lowe had been working alongside the senior senator for two decades.
Then there is the strange case in Arcadia involving what a law enforcement source called a “baby factory,” run by two Chinese nationals, Guojun Xuan and Silvia Zhang. In 2025, Arcadia police removed 21 children, most under the age of 3, from their sprawling mansion after one baby was brought to an area hospital with serious injuries. The children were born to surrogate mothers, but the couple was listed as their parents. The case is now playing out in civil courts in suits filed by the surrogate mothers, whose babies are now in foster care, but no criminal charges have been filed. “The Chinese play the long game,” a longtime intelligence official told Los Angeles, calling the mansion a likely “spy factory.”
Among the other Chinese spying cases is one involving a man who has since been convicted of running a clandestine — and wildly illegal — underground police station out of an office building in Manhattan’s Chinatown on behalf of the often-terrifying Chinese Ministry of Public Security. The MPS, according to trial testimony in May, also directed the secret cop Lu “Harry” Jianwang to travel to Southern California to spy on a dissident who made a name for himself as a protestor in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. In Pomona, that dissident, Xu Jie, used his high-profile status to fight for democracy with a popular YouTube channel, which made him a target. Jie told the court that before fleeing China, he had been arrested more than 100 times by Chinese law enforcement and lost his farm business.
He thought he was safe in Southern California. Then in 2025, he found himself a target again. He would come to testify to receiving unrelenting threatening calls, finding his car’s tires slashed and windows at his office broken. His tormentor was the man whose secret police station was raided by the FBI. He went on trial in May, where the YouTuber from Pomona was a witness, and was convicted in New York City’s Eastern District. Harry Jianwang is now slated to be sentenced this year.
The Chinese government’s interference in the U.S. has become so prevalent the FBI has a dedicated page on the bureau’s website called “The China Threat.” On it, there are five major cases taken down this year alone involving Chinese-sponsored espionage — not including the prosecution of Eileen Wang and her ex-fiancé Mike Sun, who was sentenced to two years in prison in February.
On May 14, Wang was in a Downtown L.A. federal courtroom for a short initial appearance connected to her agreement to plead guilty to working as an illegal agent of a foreign government. That same day, in a case that is unrelated to Wang, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the arrest of a Mexican cartel leader connected to the brutally savage New Generation Jalisco Cartel, who was captured in Arcadia with 17 kilograms of powder fentanyl, one kilogram of cocaine and a loaded handgun. The amount of fentanyl, Bonta said, was enough to dose the entire population of Los Angeles.
Wang is scheduled to be sentenced in October, where she is facing up to 10 years in prison. It remains unclear what will happen to the two little boys who helped her launch her California political life.