The moment is still freshly singed into Arcadia Mayor Paul P. Cheng‘s memory: A top elected official of his city pleaded guilty to a federal felony count of acting as an unregistered illegal agent for the People’s Republic of China.
Former Mayor Eileen Wang‘s May plea was a seismic jolt for the small foothill city that Cheng now leads, where he, among many, tout their pride in being American while celebrating the city’s majority Asian demographic. It’s a fusion that has shaped the city’s culture and leadership.
But with Wang’s departure, a shaken town faced immediate questions over trust, influence and accountability.
It was, as Cheng said, “a wake-up call, reminding us that even a city the size of Arcadia is not immune to concerns about foreign influence or attempts to undermine the integrity of local government.”
Arcadia has embarked on what officials say is a pioneering effort to establish protocols aimed at protecting local municipalities from such influence.
It’s an issue that reverberated on July 29 when in nearby West Covina, FBI agents served search warrants at the home and business of James Su, 56, the media executive who, public records show, donated to Wang’s 2022 campaign for Arcadia City Council.
Su, the founder and president of EDI Media Inc., is an American citizen who has donated to political campaigns across the political spectrum, his lawyer Andrew Cowan has said. His business, based in West Covina, bills itself as the largest Chinese-American multimedia company in the U.S.
While the FBI has released little information about the probe, the July 29 operation also included warrant searches at the homes and offices of powerful Inland Empire public officials, including San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman, Ontario City Councilmember Alan Wapner, and former Ontario Planning Commissioner Frank Lizarraga.
Hagman, who is also vice president of the Ontario International Airport Authority Board, has temporarily stepped away from his San Bernardino County boards, committees and commissions. Hagman has documented ties with West Covina’s Su, who donated to his campaigns.
While no one has been arrested, the probe appears to once again be looking at the role of foreign influence in the region, just as Arcadia moves closer to making rules to discourage such influence.
‘Best interests’ of the city
News of Su’s support of Wang’s 2022 campaign revived public embarrassment and anger in Arcadia, where residents are still asking how a rival, communist government could cultivate Wang, 56, and seemingly work to get her elected to City Council and have her become mayor.
Arcadia resident MJ Finstrom is among those asking questions and pushing for safeguards: “For me, I’m thoroughly creeped out and disturbed, and just feel totally lied to,” said Finstrom, adding any policy should not be about managing officials once they are elected, but “be about preventing foreign governments from planting or backing candidates to infiltrate our city council in the first place.”
Arcadia’s governing body was quick to note Wang’s wrongdoings as spelled out by the federal government happened before she was elected to the City Council in November 2022.
A review of Wang’s communications during her tenure in office revealed “no evidence that city systems, equipment, or resources were used to facilitate the conduct described in the federal case against Mrs. Wang,” the city said in a statement.
The federal charges against Wang outlines how, by her own admission, “Wang secretly served the interests of the Chinese government,” officials said. Sun and Wang received pro-China content from Chinese government officials and at their direction promoted it on a news website, U.S. News Center, which described itself as serving the Chinese American community.
John Han was appointed to the council in June to serve out Wang’s term, and the council met at a special meeting on July 21 to review existing policies and consider whether more safeguards are needed.
Cheng said the council found that few, if any, municipalities of Arcadia’s size had adopted comprehensive policies governing interactions with foreign governments.
“Our goal is not to discourage legitimate cultural, educational, or economic engagement with people and organizations from around the world,” he said. “Instead, we are encouraging collaboration between City Council, city staff, and our community to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place so that our governmental decisions remain transparent, independent, and made solely in the best interests of the residents of Arcadia.”
Some potential guidelines, which will likely return to the council for final approval in September, include strictly reviewing interactions with foreign governments such as travel, requests for certificates, and ceremonies; limits to foreign contributions in local elections; and training for local oicials to recognize malign influence efforts.
“We want no one to think of service as a way of promoting himself,” said Arcadia councilmember David Fu. “And very importantly, of course, not to do so at the expense of our country. The purpose will be to institute safeguards that tell members in advance what they can and cannot do.”
Finstrom, the Arcadia resident, castigated Cheng, Fu and Councilmember Michael Cao on July 21 for failing to remove Wang as soon as her former fiancé and campaign manager, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was arrested in December 2024.
He was charged with acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, the same accusations Wang would later face. Sun, 65, of Chino Hills, is serving a four-year sentence in federal prison. Wang faces up to 10 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 6.
City officials said they had no power to remove Wang from the council and had no prior knowledge of the FBI investigation targeting her until May 11, the day she resigned.
“We are encouraging collaboration between City Council, city staff, and our community to ensure that appropriate safeguards are in place so that our governmental decisions remain transparent, independent, and made solely in the best interests of the residents of Arcadia.” — Paul P. Cheng, Arcadia mayor
Drafting formal policies that could prevent state actors from exerting undue influence over city officials and elections is commendable, said Audrye Wong, a senior fellow at the think tank American Enterprise Institute.
“Municipal guidelines for foreign interactions are necessary and can be valuable as we see actors such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) reach into the local political landscape,” she said. “Establishing best practices, providing a baseline on what to look out for, and red flags to avoid provides a framework for these foreign interactions. But it’s not to say that any foreign interaction is bad.”
Why it matters
Why would the PRC be interested in what happens at a San Gabriel Valley city, more than 2,000 miles away from Washington, D.C.?
Wong, who studies how states use non-military tools to gain geopolitical influence, said China, as well as the governments of Russia, Turkey, and Iran are known to cultivate agents using tactics beyond covert pay-for-play arrangements, having their policies and views promoted regardless of the promoter’s proximity to national corridors of power,
“The challenge is not all of them directly saying we’re representatives of foreign governments, but Chinese Americans and American citizens with undeclared links to foreign states,” and hidden associations with consular officials and other Chinese leaders, Wong said.
In Wang’s case, the modus operandi could be support local candidates who may later rise up to state or national office.
“The Chinese government has a lot of resources,” Wong said. “They could be firing on many fronts.”
The PRC is known to work to influence the Chinese American communities, and minimize dissent and criticism of the Chinese regime, she added.
Aside from that long view, immediate payoffs to having such influence include preferential treatment of Chinese companies in awarding contracts, which appears to be related to the investigations in Lancaster and Ontario.
‘We don’t want a witch hunt’
Other cities appear to be confident in policies that they say already govern interactions with foreign governments.
The Los Angeles County Office of Protocol, which oversees the county’s procedures when foreign dignitaries visit, said federal agencies take the lead in questions of foreign influence. The office maintains relationships with consular corps, which is made up of career and honorary consulates from 94 foreign countries, and assists when consular and foreign delegations wish to engage with Los Angeles County.
In nearby West Covina, where former mayor Tony Wu has acknowledged a relationship with James Su and his wife Slina through the couple’s philanthropies, guidelines framing city leaders’ interactions with foreign governments already exist in policies governing programs such as Sister City initiatives and protocols from county, state and federal agencies.
“We’ve had FBI briefings on what to watch out for, and we don’t want a witch hunt over our local governments,” Wu said. “We are people-to-people. We are a democracy. We need to engage, no matter what country we’re dealing with, to build business, investments and tourism but always have transparency.”
Temple City spokesperson John Santos said while the city doesn’t maintain a separate policy specifically governing interactions with foreign governments or agents, city officials and employees already adhere to a code of conduct and regulations, which comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including ethical standards that govern the conduct of public officials.
Measure TC governs the city’s operations and disclosure reporting and, in many cases, exceed state and federal requirements, Santos added.
“The city’s existing framework provides a comprehensive and consistent standard for conducting official business, regardless of whether interactions are domestic or international,” he said.
Orange County has also seen its own brand of undue wrongdoing play out. That’s where former Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do is serving a five-year prison sentence for accepting bribes to steer more than $10 million in pandemic relief funds to certain nonprofits.
And it wasn’t too long ago, 2023, when former Anaheim Mayor Harry Sidhu pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about efforts to seal an Angel Stadium land deal and his intent to request up to $1 million in campaign support from the Angels baseball team.
Officials acknowledge the comparison to foreign influence is different, but they point to reforms that, in general, restrain undue influence and corruption.
“While our experience was different, Anaheim’s good governance reforms after 2022 serve as a check against all types of undue influence, whether from near or far,” said Mike Lyster, the city’s spokesperson in a statement to the Southern California News Group. “Reforms included stricter lobbying rules, with expanded lobbyist definitions, city registration and report auditing, as well as a ban on lobbyists working as City Council aides.”
Lyster noted that city officials look to federal law requiring registration of and lobbying reporting by foreign representatives, an he said the city remains open to other cities’ best practices.
Bigger picture
All of this comes in a national context that reveals a complex relationship between the U.S. and many nations, including China. On one hand, for instance, the Trump administration has imposed stiff tariffs on China, and slammed what Trump said was the nation’s meddling in U.S. elections. But Trump has also toasted Chinese President Xi Jinping as “my friend” during a recent summit, which Trump touted as a major success.
Still, even Congress has its concerns about foreign influence. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators in June passed legislation out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee aimed at “preventing foreign adversaries from influencing U.S. policy.”
Senators say the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) has not been amended since the 1990s, and is behind the times in an era when foreign adversaries use influence campaigns, commercial activities and registration loopholes to “subterfuge to advance malign interest.”
‘Foreign influence’ vs. cultural relations – and patriotism
Wong said clearly delineating the line between “foreign influence” and a city’s proper diplomatic cultural, and economic relations can be a challenge.
“In the Chinese case, that line is very hard to draw because it can be very inaccurate,” she said. “You want economic opportunities and cultural exchange, but the role of the state is very strong in China and any company you deal with are very much subject to pressures from the government. You never know that the company will be called to serve the PRC.”
For city halls in the San Gabriel Valley, serving majority Asian American populations, any proven case of China recruiting foreign agents fuels suspicion of Chinese Americans.
Fu, also the mayor pro tem of Arcadia, disputes charges that he, Cheng and Councilmember Michael Cao did nothing to remove Wang because they happen to be Asian American.
“You could not find three more different people, but we have a common bond: we love this country, we serve the law and justice, and we believe in doing what is right,” Fu said.
Fu is an attorney who was appointed to the Judicial Council of California, supervising the courts of 48 California counties.
Cao is a physician who served in active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Cheng is a lawyer and business owner who serves in the California National Guard in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal and military justice branch of the U.S. Air Force.
Councilmember Sharon Kwan, who often disagrees with the three, is a small business owner and the city’s first female Asian American mayor.
The group represents an Arcadia with an immigrant community whose residents work hard to belong, “to prove itself worthy, and we are fiercely proud Americans,” Fu said. “We resent and hate anything that causes that to be questioned.”
From 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, through the rise of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian Americans in general, and Chinese Americans in particular, continue to face discrimination.
Wong said between the Trump administration and its aggressive stance toward immigrant communities, and the PRC which is known to harass Chinese beyond its borders, Chinese Americans can themselves bolster the health of American democracy.
“Let them be part of the solution,” Wong said. “It’s about law enforcement cracking down on bad actors, yes, but it’s also important that not only agent voices be amplified in the social sphere. Chinese American voices can be loud too and that way, they can combat foreign influence without becoming like China.”
Meanwhile, Cheng, the mayor, seems to be trying to get there as the city carves out the protocols and safeguards.
“Arcadia is one of the finest cities in California,” he said. “My goal is to ensure it remains that way.”