California has been hit by yet another Chinese spy scandal. Eileen Wang, the now-former mayor of Arcadia — a Los Angeles suburb where nearly half the residents are Chinese — this week agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of Beijing. Wang and her then-fiancé and campaign treasurer Yaoning “Mike” Sun allegedly “executed directives” from Chinese officials and ran a site called US News Center to launder propaganda to Chinese-American readers. This included a letter from China’s Los Angeles Consul General airbrushing the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

Is this the latest example that California Democrats have a CCP problem? Over a decade ago, former representative Eric Swalwell found himself entangled with the Chinese agent Fang Fang. The late senator Dianne Feinstein, meanwhile, unwittingly employed a Beijing spy on her staff for two decades.

Beijing’s overseas operations rely on two arms of the regime. The first is the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s central spy agency. The second is the United Front Work Department, the party organ charged with cultivating sympathetic networks abroad. California is unusually target-rich for both: Silicon Valley, defence and aerospace sites, Stanford University, huge ports and wealthy donors all sit within easy reach. The MSS has long been reported to operate through China’s San Francisco consulate, and the state’s colossal Chinese diaspora makes it a nirvana for intelligence-gathering. Chinese operatives obtain a valuable recruitment pool and cover for their work.

Because Democratic primaries are the only elections that matter in California, operatives can swoop in as bundlers, delivering donors and votes from an ethnic community in one neat package. Fang Fang bundled for Swalwell while also scouting and grooming up-and-coming Democrats — and got results. Swalwell rose to the House Intelligence Committee, and Fang helped place an intern in his Washington office.

Wang’s incentive looks similarly transactional. Thanks to America’s lack of campaign-finance laws, CCP operatives could help her build a local political base through precisely the associations Beijing wished to influence. In a memo to his PRC handlers requesting more cash, Sun boasted that he had “orchestrated and organized” Wang’s 2022 council win, describing her as a “new political star”. The memo spotlighted the pair’s “past struggle” against “Taiwanese independence forces” and “FLG” (the anti-CCP religious movement Falun Gong) “influences” in Arcadia.

CCP infiltration will remain a bug in California politics. The Golden State’s economy is deeply tied to Chinese trade, manufacturing and technology supply chains, making it difficult to unwind that relationship. As such, Governor Gavin Newsom follows the state’s tradition of cultivating a “subnational” relationship with China. On his 2023 visit to China, Newsom told his hosts in Hong Kong that “regardless of what happens nationally, subnationally you have a partner in the state of California.” Newsom’s public statements on Chinese espionage, meanwhile, are practically non-existent.

Nor is this likely to sit near the top of Donald Trump’s agenda as he meets with Xi Jinping this week. Still, if Trump were inclined to needle his Chinese counterpart, bringing up the Arcadia case might do the trick — though Xi, knowing how many more operations remain hidden from the US, would probably feel a flicker of pity rather than embarrassment.

After all, California Democrats — even those unlikely to be in cahoots with Beijing — appear to have been none the wiser. Representative Judy Chu vigorously supported Wang’s campaign and later named her a “Congressional Woman of the Year” — proof, if any were needed, that Wang was very good at her jobs. Both of them. She’s out now, but one suspects Beijing had already pinned a medal of its own.