The CCP runs its overseas agents on the cheap by abandoning them when caught.
The CCP runs its overseas agents on the cheap by abandoning them when caught.
E arlier this month, the mayor of Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb where about six in ten residents are of Asian descent, resigned and agreed to plead guilty in federal court to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China. According to her plea agreement, Eileen Wang and her then-fiancé Yaoning “Mike” Sun took directives from PRC officials over WeChat, posted Beijing-supplied content on a website called “U.S. News Center” that presented itself as a source for community journalism, and reported view counts to their handlers. Asking a high-level PRC intelligence contact to circulate one of her articles, Wang wrote, “This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send.” After a piece denying human rights abuses in the Chinese region of Xinjiang had drawn more than 15,000 views, the handler messaged “Great!” Wang replied: “Thank you leader.”
She now faces up to ten years in federal prison.
China’s foreign ministry has said nothing about Wang by name. If past practice holds, it will dismiss the prosecution as anti-China hysteria, deny any state connection, and move on. Wang, by Beijing’s account, has nothing to do with Beijing. She is on her own.
This response is now standard procedure. Two days after Wang’s plea was unsealed, a Brooklyn jury found Lu Jianwang guilty of acting as an unregistered Chinese agent for running a Manhattan “overseas police station” on behalf of Beijing’s Ministry of Public Security. Linda Sun, the former New York gubernatorial aide whose 2025 federal trial on foreign-agent and money-laundering counts ended in a hung jury and is now headed for a retrial, received the same silent treatment. In each case, Beijing’s playbook is the same: Deny any state connection, denounce the prosecution where it speaks at all, and go quiet.
Wang’s path did not begin with a knock at the door from the Ministry of State Security (MSS). She spent two decades in Arcadia running an after-school program, moving through the same overlapping spaces that many Chinese Americans inhabit without controversy: ethnic-Chinese chambers of commerce, parents’ associations, and hometown groups.
The recruitment escalated by degrees. Sun, her then-fiancé, brought Wang to the attention of Chinese government handlers. The asks began small: Post this article, share that flyer. Each compliance was praised; each praise raised the next ask. Before long, Wang was not following orders so much as pressing them upward, urging a man whom the plea agreement identifies as a “high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus” who had personally met Xi Jinping to distribute content she supplied. Multiply that pathway — which required neither tradecraft nor a budget line — by a few thousand, and you have Beijing’s American operation.
Western counterintelligence services have spent two decades thinking about China’s intelligence-gathering efforts in the wrong way. They have treated Chinese espionage as a payroll, with named officers, ranks, pensions, and exchange protocols. But Beijing’s operation runs on a different model: It is a labor market. China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law obliges every Chinese citizen to assist intelligence work when asked, providing the legal foundation for a vast pool of contingent labor: students, businessmen, dual nationals, lobbyists, journalists, the occasional mayor.
The pattern travels. Last week in Munich, German federal prosecutors arrested a married couple of Chinese origin, both German nationals, accusing them of cultivating scientists at German universities on behalf of Chinese intelligence and luring them to China to share dual-use research. In London this spring, the captain of a Royal Navy nuclear submarine stood down from command after a blackmail-risk probe linked him to a Labour member of Parliament whose husband, David Taylor, was charged under the National Security Act for assisting Chinese intelligence through third-party lobbying. A former BBC journalist is separately under investigation over contacts cultivated in Brussels with people holding sensitive Five Eyes intelligence-sharing access. All of these recruits fit China’s labor market model.
The division of labor matters. The MSS still runs career case officers for the high-value work: classified technology theft, the cultivation of cleared insiders, the close handling of agents inside critical-infrastructure firms. Those officers are expensive, scarce, and irreplaceable. The contingent pool does something different: low-intensity, high-frequency work that requires no clearances and no tradecraft. Sit on a chamber of commerce board that lobbies a state legislator. Photograph a dissident at a vigil and pass the picture to a consulate contact. Run an “overseas police station” out of a community center on East Broadway. These tasks, in aggregate, shape what Americans hear about China and who feels safe speaking out against the CCP on American soil. They are also exactly the activities a free society finds hardest to defend against without compromising its own norms.
The result is a profound asymmetry in cost. Each American prosecution of a Chinese agent consumes real resources: FBI hours, grand-jury time, courtroom days, the political capital of hearings and protests. A failed Chinese operation, by contrast, generates a single line at a press briefing in Beijing. The MSS can therefore tolerate a much higher loss rate, cycling through dozens of contingent agents in a quarter at no comparable cost.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese Americans are not Beijing’s agents, and a policy that treats ethnicity as suspicion hands Beijing the propaganda victory it spends real money trying to manufacture. The Justice Department’s failed China Initiative is a cautionary example, not a model. The path forward has to be expensive for the party and cheap for the community.
The U.S. should make three important moves in response. The first is civic deterrence. Federal prosecutors and congressional committees should make the Wang case, the Lu case, and the next ones into public lessons about how Beijing actually treats the people who serve it. The aim is not to frighten Chinese Americans away from public life; it is to make sure anyone considering an MSS WeChat overture in 2026 understands, in advance, that Beijing will let them go to prison alone. Civic education paired with vigorous, swift, and proportionate prosecution warns the next recruit and sets a price for the last one.
The second move is to cut the money and the operational chain that feeds the contingent pool. Beijing’s American operation runs on local infrastructure: friendship associations, hometown groups, community-language media, and chambers of commerce, more than 2,000 of which have been mapped across the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany as having ties to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control can sanction the handlers, the front companies, and the funding conduits, while allowing the secondary-sanctions effect to ripple through their American banking and contracting relationships. Congress can require state and local officials to disclose hospitality, travel, and honoraria from foreign-government-linked organizations on the same terms that federal officials already face. The Justice Department can enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) against the consulting and PR firms that act as conduits, and against the United Front–linked groups that almost never register today. The tools mostly exist. The difficulty is using them at the volume the problem warrants.
The third move is to raise the price on the prosecutions that do come. Acting-as-an-agent cases like Wang’s currently cap criminal exposure low enough that Beijing can absorb the loss as overhead. Congress should stiffen the penalties under FARA and Section 951 for repeat or systematic offenders, and direct the Justice Department to name and indict the upstream handlers and front companies in the same charging documents — even where extradition is impossible. A handler who knows that a federal indictment in absentia will follow him into every banking and travel decision he makes for the rest of his career is a more expensive employee than one who can run a dozen Eileen Wangs and lose nothing personally.
Eileen Wang is on bond. Lu Jianwang awaits sentencing. No one in Beijing will mention them again. Somewhere, a junior MSS officer is already drafting the requisition for the next batch. The question for Washington is whether it intends to keep meeting that requisition one indictment at a time, or if it will start raising the price.