Feb. 11, 2026, 4:52 p.m. ET
A Southern California man has been sentenced for covertly operating as a Chinese agent while serving as campaign advisor for a local city council candidate and carrying out orders that included monitoring Taiwan’s former president during her 2023 visit to the state.
Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65, of Chino Hills, who pleaded guilty in October to a count of acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government, was sentenced earlier this week to four years in federal prison.
According to John Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, Sun carried out directives from Chinese government officials over a period of years, surveilling groups in the United States that Beijing viewed as threatening and disseminating Chinese propaganda to influence public discourse.
“His conduct represents a brazen violation of our national sovereignty,” Eisenberg said in a news release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Court documents say Sun knowingly acted as an agent of the People’s Republic of China and its government officials without notifying the U.S. Attorney General as required by law. At the direction of Chinese officials, they say, Sun coordinated with other people in the U.S. to promote Chinese interests by, among other things, orchestrating a group to help elect a candidate he described to Beijing as a “new political star” and push pro-PRC propaganda.
Sun’s activities occurred from at least 2022 through January 2024. Along with the city council candidate, unidentified in court documents, Sun operated a purported news website for the local Chinese American community while carrying out Chinese officials’ orders to post pro-PRC content. The Los Angeles Times identified the candidate as Eileen Wang, who was sworn in as mayor of Arcadia, California, on Feb. 3.
USA TODAY has reached out to Wang for comment.
In 2022, Sun served as Wang’s city council campaign adviser and “close personal confidante,” prosecutors said. After her November election, the two attended a meeting of people Sun described as a team “dedicated” to Chinese interests, according to his plea agreement.
In February 2023, court documents say, Sun drafted a report to PRC officials suggesting “part of our Los Angeles organization’s professional core team” be utilized to counter “anti-China forces” overseas and requesting $80,000 from the Chinese government to fund a pro-China demonstration at a Fourth of July parade in Washington, D.C.
The documents say Sun closely surveilled then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her April 2023 visit to Southern California, including sending real-time updates on her movements to an official at the People’s Republic of China’s consulate in Los Angeles and taking photographs for the official of people demonstrating for and against Tsai.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, prosecutors said, Sun communicated with an official at the consulate about Taiwan-related activities in Southern California.
“As an agent for the PRC, [Sun] worked covertly in the United States with his primary co-conspirator John Chen, a/k/a ‘Chen Jun,’” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum. They described Chen as “a high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus” who regularly attended elite Chinese Communist Party functions and met personally with Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Sun, they said, “served as Chen’s right-hand man in the United States for decades.”
Chen, who had plotted to target U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China, was sentenced in November 2024 to 20 months in federal prison after pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York to acting as an illegal agent of the PRC and conspiracy to bribe an Internal Revenue Service agent.
The FBI conducted the investigation.
“When Americans vote for elected officials, they expect them to represent the interests of their constituents – not those of a foreign adversary like the Chinese government,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. “By exploiting his position as a campaign advisor, Yaoning Sun attempted to undermine our political processes and democratic institutions for the benefit of the Chinese Communist Party.”
