California-based Chinese real estate agent Zhang Wanying monitoring the arrest of the son of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has sparked concerns about escalating Chinese Communist Party espionage activities on American soil.
On Monday, October 5th, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for carrying out espionage activities on U.S. territory while claiming to desire strategic stability with Washington, thereby undermining American national interests.
The editorial pointed out the audacity of Beijing conducting spying activities on American soil and seeming to believe they could get away with it.
According to publicly available information from the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 10 individuals were charged in 2025 alone for engaging in espionage activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist regime.
The Zhang Wanying case is just the tip of the iceberg regarding Chinese Communist espionage activities in the United States. Other examples abound, such as attempts to infiltrate the U.S. military for sensitive information, stealing technologies from American companies, monitoring universities, Chinese dissidents in exile, and Chinese students studying in the U.S.
Researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Andrew Harding, told The New York Post, “We see that Chinese (Communist Party) espionage activities in the United States are indeed on the rise.”
The policy analyst noted that the People’s Republic of China (Communist Party) is conducting “industrial-scale” espionage operations in the U.S. through its Ministry of State Security (MSS), stealing U.S. commercial secrets and academic research findings.
“Businesses are targets, Chinese students pretend to study in the U.S., enter specialized courses to learn, then translate the course material back to China, and so-called tourists seek ways to enter sensitive (American) military bases and take photos,” he illustrated.
Harding highlighted that the Chinese Communist Party often uses proxies in the American Chinese community to engage in espionage activities.
“One key avenue by which they engage in espionage is through sympathetic American Chinese community and organizations that support the Chinese Communist government… but that’s just the beginning,” he said. “Stealing commercial secrets and academic research findings are Beijing’s standard tactics.”
“This is an all-out effort by the Chinese Communist Party to undermine the American way of life, threaten American innovation, and dominance,” Harding added.
Zhang Wanying was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at Los Angeles International Airport on the 4th. Five months earlier, Eileen Wang, the former Chinese-American mayor of Arcadia, Southern California, admitted to illegally acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party. She faces up to 10 years in prison.
She blamed her former fiancé, Mike Sun, aged 65, stating she was deceived. Sun, in February, was sentenced to four years in prison for acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party.
Between 2020 and 2023, the two collaborated with the Chinese government, using a fake news website targeting American Chinese residents for pro-Communist propaganda in the U.S.
According to Sun’s plea agreement, under the guidance of Chinese officials, he “planned” Eileen Wang’s election victory in 2022 and then submitted detailed reports to the Chinese intelligence department, outlining how they successfully “cultivated” a pro-Chinese government “political rising star.”
In September, American journalist Thomas Weir Pauken II was sentenced to two years in prison in Virginia for acting as an agent of the Chinese government.
Pauken, who had long resided in Beijing, had been working as an editor and commentator for Chinese official media and other state-owned news agencies under the pen name Tom McGregor. Prosecutors stated that the 51-year-old received at least $100,000 from China over seven years, writing reports on U.S.-China relations and American politics. He even underwent lie detector tests for Chinese intelligence agencies and was told his reports were passed on to top Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping.
At the beginning of this year, former U.S. Navy sailor Jinchao Wei, at the urge of his mother, sold sensitive naval information to the Chinese government and received $12,000, resulting in a 16-year prison sentence at the San Diego Naval Base.
In 2025, 69-year-old American Chinese democracy activist Yuanjun Tang admitted to engaging in espionage for the Chinese Communist Party in New York, monitoring other dissidents. Also, in the same year, 64-year-old British businessman John Miller and his 44-year-old Chinese “contact” Guanghai Cui attempted to silence a Chinese dissident living in Southern California who openly criticized Xi Jinping in addition to plotting to smuggle U.S. military weapons to China for reverse engineering.
Miller and Cui fled to Serbia and were placed under house arrest by local authorities. However, they escaped while awaiting extradition back to the U.S.
Former CIA officer and former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, David Shedd, told The New York Post that Beijing’s spy network in the U.S. is “very extensive.”
“The Chinese are becoming more daring and reckless in their actions,” Shedd said. “They have invested too much to surpass the U.S. as a global power, so they have spies at all levels of the federal, state, and local government because influence is crucial.”
Chinese human rights expert Yaqiu Wang stated that concurrently, the Chinese regime is intensifying its crackdown on domestic citizens while exerting pressure on American-Chinese nationals to comply.
“Some are forced to do so because their family members back in China are threatened,” she noted. “I personally know many who have been harassed, followed, and subjected to cyber attacks in America by China… The Chinese Communist Party also recruits some individuals as informants, who voluntarily offer information to please the Chinese government.”
She added, “The U.S. government is not doing enough to protect its citizens and allocate resources to stop such behavior.”
Shedd agreed with this assessment.
“We have underestimated the scale of Beijing’s intelligence network in the U.S.,” he said. “China is interested in all aspects of America.”
Following Zhang Wanying’s arrest, FBI Director Kash Patel posted, “Allegedly monitoring foreign leaders and their families for China (CCP) on U.S. soil, attempting to escape back to Shanghai on a flight is simply not possible.”
Patel added that the FBI is investigating threats to national security, resolving to bring those threats to justice, no matter where they hide.