The Cheapest Seat in American Politics

By Matt Stone

While Washington argues about the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, chips, carriers, and Taiwan, the Chinese government ran a quieter operation 2,300 miles from the Capitol: it helped elect a member of the Arcadia, California city council. Population roughly 50,000. Five seats. The mayor's job rotates among them. On May 29, 2026, that mayor, Eileen Wang, walked out of a federal courthouse in Los Angeles having pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the People's Republic of China. An LA suburb mayor--was a Chinese agent, and she basically just walked in and took the position.

This is not an espionage thriller about stolen secrets. Arcadia has no secrets worth stealing. That is exactly the point. The case is the clearest documented example to date of Beijing's actual strategy for American politics, and it works from the bottom up, literally.

The chain, link by link

Everything below comes from Department of Justice press releases, federal court documents, and the reporting built on them. Find a factual error and The Grounded pays you $100.

Link one: the intelligence officer. Chen Jun, also known as John Chen, was described by federal prosecutors as a high-level member of the PRC intelligence apparatus who attended elite Chinese Communist Party functions, including military parades, and met personally with Xi Jinping. He 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 a public official, a scheme that targeted U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong.

Link two: the operative. Yaoning "Mike" Sun of Chino Hills, a Chinese national who conspired with Chen, ran the ground game. According to the Justice Department, Sun worked for years at the direction of Chinese government officials, surveilling groups Beijing viewed as threatening and pushing PRC propaganda into American public discourse. In 2022 he served as campaign advisor and treasurer for a city council candidate in Arcadia. In a 2023 report written for his Chinese government contacts, soliciting more money and more tasks, Sun touted his service in the People's Liberation Army and bragged about the campaign in his own words: "During the 2022 midterm elections, I orchestrated and organized my team to win the election for city council." He called his candidate a "new political star." The same report requested $80,000 to organize a pro-PRC demonstration at a Fourth of July parade in Washington, D.C. Sun pleaded guilty in October 2025 and was sentenced this year to four years in federal prison. His assignments also included monitoring Taiwan's former president during her 2023 visit to California.

Link three: the elected official. Eileen Wang was Sun's candidate, his business partner, and for a time his fiancée. She won her Arcadia council seat in November 2022. Before that election, according to her plea agreement, she received and executed directives from PRC officials, including posting content supplied by the Chinese state on a purported community news website she and Sun operated. In one November 2021 exchange, Wang asked Chen to post an article and told him, "This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send." She never disclosed any of it. She rotated into the mayor's office in February 2026, was charged in May, resigned, and pleaded guilty within three weeks. Sentencing is set for October 6. The charge carries up to ten years.

PRC intelligence to operative to elected American official. Three nodes, every link documented in federal court.

Why a city council?

Because it is the cheapest seat in American politics, and the system guarding it is unarmed and wholly unprepared. Officials at the local and city level do not face the same vetting and attention as federal politicians.

A federal race draws opposition researchers, national press, FEC scrutiny, and intelligence community attention. An Arcadia council race draws almost none of that. Local campaign finance disclosure is thin, local press is dying, and no counterintelligence apparatus reviews who runs your candidate's ground operation. Sun's own report to Beijing reads like an investor pitch precisely because that is what it was: proof of concept, requesting follow-on funding.

And the seat is not the endgame. It is the entry point. Sun's phrase "new political star" is the tell. Today's suburban council member is tomorrow's state assembly candidate, the next decade's member of Congress, arriving with a donor network, a media operation, and a handler relationship already a decade old. Beijing was not buying Arcadia. It was buying a future and setting a new modus operandi.

The model also exploits a real vulnerability in how we respond. Arcadia's city government learned of Sun's arrest in December 2024 and conducted an internal review, but Wang stayed on the council and rotated into the mayor's chair fourteen months later. Her campaign treasurer was literally arrested as a Chinese agent, yet Wang stayed on the city council and even became mayor after the arrest. The acting mayor later said the council's hands were tied; the city charter allows removal only upon conviction. He was right. The system is built to presume innocence, as it should be, and Beijing knows that too. They also know where the weaknesses lie in a system where innocence is presumed, and everyone has the right to a fair trial. The full extent of the conduct only became public when the plea agreement was unsealed. China has been demonstrating a better understanding of American laws and politics than most Americans, and probably most politicians.

Doctrine, not opportunism

I studied this playbook before I ever covered it. My graduate research at American University examined how rising techno-nationalism is reshaping the development and regulation of AI across the United States, China, and the European Union, and one finding from that work is directly relevant here: Beijing's strategy has never been confined to technology. It is a whole-of-society doctrine in which influence is exported through every available channel, calibrated to the target.

The pattern repeats at every altitude. At the global level, Xi Jinping's Global AI Governance Initiative, launched at the 2023 Belt and Road Forum alongside the Global Development, Security, and Civilization Initiatives, packages Chinese leadership as international cooperation. At the regional level, Beijing has exported its surveillance and censorship model abroad, hosting trainings like 2017's two-week "Seminar on Cyberspace Management for Officials of Countries along the Belt and Road Initiative," where visiting officials toured a company selling tools for real-time monitoring of negative public opinion. Freedom House documented that a 2017 training for Vietnamese officials was followed by a Vietnamese cybersecurity law that closely mimics China's own, and that increased Chinese engagement in Africa similarly preceded restrictive cybercrime and media laws in Uganda and Tanzania. At the industrial level, Made in China 2025 set out to convert foreign dependency into Chinese leverage. The through line is the same everywhere: find the soft entry point, invest patiently, and let the target's own institutions do the rest. China is nothing if not patient.

Arcadia is that doctrine applied to American electoral politics. A city council seat is to political influence what a joint research venture is to technology transfer: a low-scrutiny, fully legal-looking channel into a system that assumes good faith. The operative even ran the operation like a state program, with a written report to Beijing, performance metrics, and a request for follow-on funding. That is not a rogue scheme. That is a line item.

Albany, too

The local layer connects upward. In a separate case, federal prosecutors charged Linda Sun (no relation to Mike Sun), a former deputy chief of staff to New York Governor Kathy Hochul who served over a decade in state government, with acting as an undisclosed agent of the PRC. Prosecutors alleged she blocked Taiwanese officials from access to the governor's office, stripped a Lunar New Year message of any reference to detained Uyghurs, and received millions in benefits, business deals, and gifts ranging from a Honolulu condominium to salted ducks prepared by a Chinese official's personal chef. Her trial ended in December 2025 with a hung jury on all 19 counts; jurors reportedly split 10-2 on most of them. Sun maintains her innocence, and prosecutors have said they intend to retry the case. Whatever the eventual verdict, the indictment itself maps the same architecture one level up: not stealing secrets, but quietly shaping which messages get sent, which meetings happen, and which never do. In part, allegedly, for salted fucking ducks.

The scoreboard this year

So how many local elected officials were "traced back to China" in 2026? By the strict standard The Grounded applies, officials who admitted it or were convicted, the answer is one: Eileen Wang. That number should not comfort anyone. It took federal investigators years to surface a three-person chain in one small city, the operative's own report described a team and solicited expansion funding, and the experts who study Chinese influence operations told NPR after Wang's plea that the case fits a pattern, not an anomaly. One documented chain is not a fluke or the end of the story. It is just the part of the iceberg the Justice Department has so far managed to observe above the water.

The defense of American democracy is currently structured to watch the top of the ballot. The documented evidence says the threat starts at the bottom. China understood the assignment. Americans forgot there even was an assignment.

In a world that was already returning to multipolarity, global confidence in the United States is waning. The liberal democratic order that the United States built after World War II was based on mutually beneficial relationships. We spent decades building the world's trust, at least in countries where the CIA was not operating, and have destroyed most of the goodwill we had left with the actions of the current administration. Any vacuum will be filled, and China is already filling it.

Matt Stone is a former Army Ranger and a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. He holds an MA in International Relations with a concentration in Global Security from American University, where his graduate research analyzed techno-nationalism and the geopolitics of AI across the United States, China, and the European Union.

Sources: Freedom House, "Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism," freedomhouse.org; U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California, press releases on the charges and plea of Eileen Wang (May 2026) and the arrest, plea, and sentencing of Yaoning "Mike" Sun (December 2024 to 2026), justice.gov; DOJ Office of Public Affairs; U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, sentencing of Chen Jun (November 2024); plea agreement of Eileen Wang, U.S. District Court, Central District of California; United States v. Sun and Hu, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, trial coverage via CNN, CBS New York, Courthouse News Service, and amNewYork (November to December 2025); NPR and KPBS reporting on the Wang plea (May 2026); CNN, Time, NBC Los Angeles, and Associated Press coverage of the Wang case (May 2026).