The Two Faces of Arcadia: A Spy in City Hall and a Mansion Full of Surrogate Babies
On paper, Arcadia is a quiet, leafy suburb east of Los Angeles. In reality, this city of 56,000 has spent the past year at the center of two of the most disturbing scandals in California — a mayor secretly working for a foreign power, and a couple accused of running what neighbors now call a “baby factory.”
A spy in the mayor’s chair
For three months in early 2026, Eileen Wang ran the city as mayor. Federal prosecutors say that for years before that, she was running errands for Beijing.
Wang, 58, has pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China — a felony that could send her to prison for a decade. Prosecutors say that between 2020 and 2022, Chinese government handlers fed her pre-written articles through encrypted WeChat messages, which she dutifully published on a website dressed up as a local news outlet for Southern California’s Chinese American community.
The man at her side through it all was Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65 — her campaign manager and, at one point, her fiancé. He has already been sentenced to four years in federal prison. Investigators say his reports flowed straight to China’s United Front Work Department, the shadowy arm of the Chinese state that recruits members of the diaspora to push Beijing’s agenda abroad.
Wang rode glowing press coverage and deep-pocketed donors to a City Council seat in 2022. By February 2026 she held the gavel as mayor. By May 11 she had resigned in disgrace, her official biography quietly scrubbed from the city’s website. Through her lawyer, she offered an apology — and insisted her love for Arcadia never wavered.
The mansion with 21 children
A short drive away, behind the gates of a nine-bedroom mansion on Camino Real Avenue, police uncovered something they say they had never seen before.
It started with a 2-month-old rushed to the hospital with a traumatic head injury. When detectives followed the trail back to the home, they found 15 children inside, ranging from infants to a 13-year-old, watched over by a rotating staff of nannies. The house, officers said, was laid out like a school. Surveillance footage allegedly captured the children being struck and shaken — including the very baby who ended up in the ER.
The couple at the center of it — Silvia Zhang, 38, and Guojun Xuan, 65 — were briefly arrested on child endangerment charges, then released. But the bigger questions had only just begun. Investigators determined the children were the product of a surrogacy operation the couple secretly owned themselves. In total, 21 children were swept into protective custody.
Surrogate mothers came forward feeling deceived, saying they’d been told the couple had just one other child. And even after the raid made national headlines, the pair kept going — fathering and claiming more surrogate-born babies in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Georgia, each one seized by the state. The FBI, it later emerged, had been watching since 2023.
One city, two nightmares
There is no evidence the two cases are connected. But for the residents of Arcadia, that may be the most unsettling part of all — that a single small city could quietly host both a foreign agent in its highest office and a surrogacy operation that left two dozen children in the hands of the state, and almost no one noticed until it was too late.
