On May 11, 2026, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, was charged with acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and agreed to a plea deal in federal court. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), she was accused of working as a foreign agent of the PRC. The specific conduct at issue was sharing articles deemed propaganda under the direction of an unnamed PRC official on a website called US News Center.1
According to the DOJ report, the articles were specifically related to the Xinjiang autonomous region in China. Xinjiang has long been a strategic area in China, from the Kuomintang’s use of Muslim and Kazakh forces against the People’s Liberation Army in the 1940s to the contemporary fomenting of Islamic terrorist groups culminating in the Urumqi attacks and of course the large oil and material resources in the region.2 Given that the Xinjiang genocide story has been thoroughly debunked at this point, with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation refusing to condemn China and even praising its treatment of Muslims and even the imperial US State Department lawyers stating they lacked evidence of genocide, this story reeks of the US media trying to blow up any single instance of PRC “influence” into a national story meant to justify absolute enmity.34
While it is obvious that any sovereign government will protect itself from foreign influence, mainstream foreign policy analysts have long noted that all governments engage each other through covert means. One of the “wise men” of US foreign policy past, George Kennan, described this explicitly in his 1948 text “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare” where he argues that nations utilize “all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert.”5
Given this context, Eileen Wang’s case is illustrative of larger US strategy. Even if we accept the official narrative that she was acting at the behest of a Chinese official, which is indeed a serious crime, the case appears minor compared with the scale of covert and overt influence operations that powerful states routinely conduct.
Wang’s case is among a number of other anti-China policies and domestic political actions aimed at portraying China as a uniquely dangerous foreign threat. While anti-China positions are nothing new among the US ruling class, indeed, we are already at war with China in the Clausewitzian sense, the desperation to elevate this story to national importance is one of a number of signals indicating that the US would prefer a confrontation with China sooner rather than later. This is likely because in the next few years China will definitely pull ahead of the US in every conceivable way and at that point be effectively untouchable.
The consequences of Wang’s case will likely be similar to those previous anti-China actions, namely a growing anti-Chinese paranoia amongst the populace to drum up support for more aggressive actions. Yet at the same time, some Americans are waking up to the various double standards and contradictions at play. The top comment on the FBI’s own facebook post states “Does this mean you're going after AIPAC?”. A number of other commentators also suggested that the DOJ should instead be looking into Israeli foreign agents in the Trump administration.6 These tendencies highlight a new developing perspective among Americans, one that is sympathetic to China and intensely hostile to our own ruling class. In other words, a perspective ripe for revolution.
U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, “Arcadia Mayor Federally Charged with Acting as Illegal Agent of People’s Republic of China,” May 11, 2026. https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/arcadia-mayor-federally-charged-acting-illegal-agent-peoples-republic-china
Suhomlinova, “Xinjiang in Postwar China’s Frontier Politics, 1945–1949,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 15, no. 1 (2025). https://ijhss.thebrpi.org/journals/Vol_15_2025/11.pdf
Human Rights Watch, “A Missed Opportunity to Protect Muslims in China,” March 21, 2019. https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/03/21/missed-opportunity-protect-muslims-china
Colum Lynch, “State Department Lawyers Concluded Insufficient Evidence to Prove Genocide in China,” Foreign Policy, February 19, 2021. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/19/china-uighurs-genocide-us-pompeo-blinken/
George F. Kennan, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” April 30, 1948, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Document 269, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d269
FBI Los Angeles, “Case Update from FBI Los Angeles: Arcadia Mayor Federally Charged with Acting in the United States as an Illegal Agent of the People’s Republic of China,” Facebook, May 2026. https://www.facebook.com/FBI/posts/case-update-from-fbi-los-angeles-arcadia-mayor-federally-charged-with-acting-in-/1393351139505115/