Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang resigned Monday and agreed to plead guilty to a federal felony of acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China — the highest-profile California elected official yet to fall in a federal counterintelligence campaign that has now reached into the political infrastructure of the San Gabriel Valley.
For South Pasadena, the case carries a documented, if narrow, local connection. The same Chinese American political action committee that endorsed Wang for her 2022 Arcadia council run later endorsed Charley Lu — chairman of that PAC at the time — in his 2024 bid for South Pasadena City Council District 2, the race ultimately won by Sheila Rossi. Eileen Wang attended the September 2024 press conference at which then South Pasadena Council Candidate Lu received that endorsement.
At the time of this report: There is no evidence in any public record that Lu had knowledge of, or any involvement in, the activities to which Wang has now agreed to plead guilty. He has not been charged with or accused of any wrongdoing in any forum. This article documents only what the public record establishes.
The Federal Case
Wang, 58, made her initial appearance Monday afternoon in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles, where she was released on a $25,000 bond. She is charged via information with one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent of a foreign government, an offense carrying a maximum 10-year federal prison term. A formal change-of-plea hearing is expected in the coming weeks.
The plea agreement, filed under seal April 1 and unsealed by federal prosecutors Monday, lays out a coordinated pattern in which Wang — together with her then-fiancé and campaign treasurer Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65, of Chino Hills — operated a website branded as community journalism but in fact populated, at Beijing’s direction, with pre-written PRC government propaganda.
According to the Justice Department, in June 2021 a PRC official sent Wang and others on the WeChat messaging app a pre-written article asserting there was “no genocide in Xinjiang” and “no such thing as ‘forced labor.'” Within minutes, prosecutors say, Wang posted the article to her website, U.S. News Center, and sent the official a confirmation link. “So fast, thank you everyone,” the official replied.
In August 2021, after Wang made requested edits to another article and sent a screenshot showing it had been viewed 15,128 times, the PRC official messaged: “Great!” Wang’s reply: “Thank you leader.”
The plea agreement also describes November 2021 communications between Wang and John Chen, identified by prosecutors as a high-ranking PRC intelligence operative who personally met President Xi Jinping. Chen was sentenced in November 2024 to 20 months in federal prison.
Sun was sentenced in February 2026 to four years in federal prison after pleading guilty in October 2025 to the same statute. In a February 2023 internal report to his PRC handlers seeking additional funding, Sun wrote that “during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, I orchestrated and organized my team to win the election for city council.”
The City of Arcadia confirmed Wang’s resignation Monday. Deputy City Manager Justine Bruno said in a statement that the allegations are “deeply troubling” but emphasized an internal review found “no city finances, staff, or decision-making processes were involved.” Wang’s attorneys, Brian A. Sun and Jason Liang, said the conduct related to “a media platform that she once operated with someone whom she believed to be her fiancé” and not to city business.
The Arcadia City Council, now reduced to four members, will select a new mayor and mayor pro tem at its next meeting and determine how District 3 will be represented through the November 2026 election.
The South Pasadena Connection: The PAC, the Endorsement, and the September 2024 Event
The principal documented link between the Arcadia case and South Pasadena’s recent political history runs through a domestically registered political action committee called the I-Chinese American Political Action Committee, known as IAPAC.
Founded in 1999 as the Indo-Chinese American Political Action Committee and renamed in 2014, IAPAC describes itself as a nonpartisan civic organization committed to increasing Chinese American electoral participation. It has endorsed more than 200 candidates of both major parties at the federal, state, county and municipal levels over more than two decades, by its own count, with an endorsement-success rate it places at roughly 80 percent.
Three documented facts establish the link:
IAPAC Endorsed Eileen Wang in 2022.
A 2022 campaign endorsement list that Wang published on her own LinkedIn page identified “I-Chinese American Political Action Committee (IAPAC)” among the community organizations supporting her bid for Arcadia City Council. That endorsement was issued while Charley Lu — South Pasadena Public Safety Commissioner and a Tsinghua University-trained engineer — served as IAPAC’s 11th chairman, a post he held from 2022 until February 2026.
IAPAC Endorsed Charley Lu in 2024.
At a press conference held September 20, 2024, at 888 Restaurant in Rosemead, IAPAC announced its endorsement of a slate of 38 federal, state, county and municipal candidates for the November 5, 2024 general election. Mr. Lu — listed under his Chinese name, 卢春雨 (Lu Chunyu) — appeared on that slate as IAPAC’s endorsed candidate for South Pasadena City Council District 2. IAPAC explicitly identified Lu as one of six endorsees the organization characterized as long-term IAPAC volunteers.
The endorsement was reported in Chinese-language media at the time, including by an outlet operating under the name 美新社 (U.S. News Center) — coincidentally the same banner under which Wang and Sun operated the propaganda website now at the center of the federal case. The IAPAC endorsement was a publicly announced, lawful political endorsement made in the ordinary course of the PAC’s operations and is not implicated in any federal court filing.
Eileen Wang Attended the Press Conference at Which Lu Received the Endorsement.
The Chinese-language news report on the September 20, 2024, IAPAC endorsement event states that “亞凱迪亞市議員王愛琳（Eileen Wang） 也到場表達支持” — “Arcadia Council Member Eileen Wang also came to express support.” San Gabriel Mayor John Wu administered a loyalty oath to the slate of endorsed candidates. Wang attended in her capacity as an Arcadia councilmember; the event predated her elevation to the Arcadia mayor’s chair on February 3, 2026.
The September 2024 event occurred roughly nine months after the conduct Wang has now admitted to in her plea agreement (which ended in 2022) and roughly three months before federal charges were filed against Sun in December 2024.
The 2024 South Pasadena City Council District 2 Race.
Lu lost the District 2 race to Sheila Rossi on November 5, 2024, by 137 votes — 1,136 to 999, or 53.2% to 46.8% in the certified count — in what was South Pasadena’s closest contested council race of that cycle. Rossi was sworn in that December, currently serves as the city’s mayor, and was joined on the council by Omari Ferguson, who won District 1 the same night against then-Mayor Evelyn Zneimer.
Despite Rossi’s victory, Lu’s campaign held a significant fundraising advantage throughout the cycle. Campaign-finance disclosures filed with the California Fair Political Practices Commission and reported by other publications showed Lu raised approximately $53,973 through mid-October 2024 — from 52 itemized individual donors, five businesses, and roughly $15,684 in unitemized small-dollar contributions. His itemized totals included 18 donations of $1,000, one of $989, one of $800, and 37 of $500. Final pre-election totals reported by the Rossi campaign, citing Lu’s own filings, placed his fundraising at over $54,000.
Rossi raised under $16,000 over the same period — a roughly 3.4-to-1 disadvantage — and stated on her campaign website that more than 90 percent of her contributions came from inside South Pasadena, while more than 90 percent of Lu’s came from outside the city, including from individual and corporate donors associated with real estate investment firms and developers. Rossi stated publicly that she declined contributions from real estate industry sources.
Lu’s 2024 campaign also drew endorsements from a range of mainstream sources, including the Los Angeles County Democratic Party’s affiliated clubs and the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters. His publicly filed campaign committee was titled “Charley Lu for South Pasadena City Council 2024.”
Lu passed the IAPAC chairmanship to incoming chair Victor Gau at an installation ceremony in February 2026, attended by Los Angeles County Assessor Jeff Prang. He continues to serve on the IAPAC board as immediate past chair. He had not responded to a request for comment by press time.
What the Record Does Not Show
Several claims have circulated online or in other coverage that the public record does not support and that this newspaper has therefore not reported above. Three are worth specifically addressing.
On the Byron Wan Social-Media Post:
A December 2024 post by an analyst writing on the Arcadia case named several “prominent pro-CCP figures in California” he said had backed Wang’s 2022 council bid. One name in that list was rendered as “Charles Lu (鹿强).” That Chinese name — 鹿强, pinyin Lù Qiáng — belongs, according to publicly available business and civic profiles, to a different individual: a Los Angeles-area insurance and restaurant-group executive long associated with Southern California Chinese diaspora federations. He is not the South Pasadena City Council candidate. South Pasadena’s Charley Lu is 卢春雨 (Lu Chunyu), a different person with a different Chinese surname character, a different professional background (engineering, formerly Cogent Systems and currently Silvus Technologies), and a different civic résumé. Any reporting that treats these two men as the same person is incorrect.
On Rep. Judy Chu and Lu’s 2024 Council Race:
According to our research, Rep. Judy Chu did not officially endorse Lu’s 2024 bid for South Pasadena City Council. A letter to the editor published in the South Pasadena Review in support of Lu’s campaign stated that his prior civil-rights and medical-aid nonprofit work had earned him “recognition from Congresswoman Judy Chu and the Biden administration” — a description of past civic recognition, not a campaign endorsement of the city council race. Chu’s chief of staff, Enrique Robles, attended the September 20, 2024, IAPAC press conference on her behalf to accept Rep. Judy Chu’s own IAPAC re-election endorsement; Representative Chu did not personally attend. Chu did publicly endorse Eileen Wang’s 2022 Arcadia council bid, and in early 2024 honored Wang as one of her Congressional “Women of the Year.” After federal charges were filed against Sun in December 2024, Judy Chu told the Los Angeles Times that she did not personally know Mr. Sun.
On Independent Expenditures:
This South Pasadenan News has found no documented evidence that any independent expenditure by IAPAC or by any party identified in federal filings flowed into the 2024 South Pasadena District 2 race. California Form 460 campaign-finance filings for that race are publicly available through the South Pasadena City Clerk and the California Secretary of State, and any independent-expenditure activity over the reporting thresholds would appear there.
Federal Officials’ Framing
“By her own admission, Eileen Wang secretly served the interests of the Chinese government,” Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said in a statement Monday. “Let this serve as a clear warning: individuals who act on behalf of foreign governments to influence our democracy will be identified, investigated, and brought to justice.”
Patrick Grandy, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, was sharper: “All Americans should be alarmed to learn an elected official was brazenly spreading propaganda on behalf of the Chinese government.”
The Wang plea is the latest in a sequence of San Gabriel Valley-centered foreign-influence prosecutions — Chen, Sun, and now Wang — that prosecutors have characterized as exposing a sustained PRC effort to cultivate local elected officials in Chinese American communities in the hope they would rise to higher office and shape California policy in directions favorable to Beijing, particularly on Taiwan.
Moving On
Wang is expected to formally enter her guilty plea before a federal judge in Los Angeles in the coming weeks. The plea agreement allows the government to recommend reductions in the sentencing-guideline range; the final sentence will be set by the court.
In Arcadia, the council’s next regular meeting will take up mayoral selection and District 3 representation. The seat is on the November 2026 ballot.
As of now in South Pasadena, the city’s day-to-day governance proceeds normally under Mayor Rossi.
This is a developing story. The South Pasadenan will publish pertinent updates as additional information becomes available.
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