LOS ANGELES \u2014 A Southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government, and has resigned from her city position, officials said Monday.<\/p>\n
Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, was charged in April with one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favourable to Beijing, without prior notification to the U.S. government as required by law.<\/p>\n
The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected on a rotating basis.<\/p>\n
City manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a news release that no city finances or staff were involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to be clear: this investigation concerns individual conduct, and the charges are for conduct that ceased after Ms. Wang was sworn into office in December 2022,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Federal officials said she has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.<\/p>\n
According to her plea agreement, Wang and a colleague, Yaoning \u201cMike\u201d Sun, worked on behalf of government officials for the People\u2019s Republic of China from the end of 2020 to 2022 to promote their interests by promoting pro-PRC propaganda in the U.S. Sun is serving a four-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to the same charge last October. He was also listed in campaign filings as the treasurer for Wang\u2019s 2022 election campaign.<\/p>\n
Wang and Sun operated the news website U.S. News Center, aimed at the Chinese American community, and were instructed by Chinese government officials to post pro-PRC content on it. <\/p>\n
Wang has also communicated with John Chen, who also pleaded guilty to being an agent for the Chinese government and was sentenced to 20 months in prison.<\/p>\n
Wang is expected to appear in federal court Monday afternoon in downtown Los Angeles and plead guilty in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n
Arcadia is located about 13 miles (21 kilometres) northeast of Los Angeles. The city of about 53,000 is majority Asian and has a high concentration of Chinese residents.<\/p>\n
Jaimie Ding, The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOS ANGELES \u2014 A Southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,77,44,714,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-664157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-international","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}