Another CCP Agent Pleads Guilty in U.S., Targets Included Falun Gong

LOS ANGELES — Yaoning “Mike” Sun, 65, a resident of Chino Hills, California, pleaded guilty in federal court on Oct. 27 to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Sun operated under the direction of Chinese government officials to advance Beijing’s political and propaganda interests in the United States — including efforts targeting Falun Gong practitioners and other groups labeled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as “anti-China forces.”

According to the plea agreement obtained by the Falun Dafa Information Center, in Feburary 2023, Sun drafted a report to PRC officials seeking additional funding and new assignments. In the document, he described “overseas anti-China forces,” naming “Taiwan independence, Tibet independence, Xinjiang independence, and Falun Gong” as groups that had been “active for a long time, infiltrating and active in various mainstream fields.” Sun proposed “using part of our Los Angeles organization’s professional core team” to “counteract those forces” — language that echoed the CCP’s own disinformation and suppression campaigns against Falun Gong and other perceived dissidents.

The plea agreement addressed only the second count of the indictment — acting as an illegal foreign agent — but did not include the first count of conspiracy from the criminal complaint filed on Dec. 17, 2024. In that complaint, Sun was also charged with conspiring with another man, Chen Jun (also known as John Chen), who was sentenced to federal prison last year for acting as an illegal agent of the PRC government and plotting to target U.S.-based practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice banned in China.

Chen, 72, was sentenced to 20 months in prison for attempting to bribe a purported IRS official with $50,000 in a scheme to revoke the tax-exempt status of Shen Yun Performing Arts, a classical Chinese dance company founded by Falun Gong practitioners. His accomplice, Lin Feng, a Chinese national and U.S. permanent resident, was sentenced to 16 months in prison on Sept. 26, 2024.