The Trump-Xi summit emphasized stability. But China’s recruitment of foreign agents has fueled suspicion of Chinese Americans.
For Chinese Americans, the news this week might have seemed disorienting.
There was the largely make-nice tone of the summit in Beijing between President Trump and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, which ended on Friday.
But in the days leading up to the summit, two criminal cases in the United States reflected how the countries’ competitive and often tense geopolitical relationship has made life more difficult for many people of Chinese origin living in the United States.
On Monday, federal prosecutors announced that Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, a suburb outside Los Angeles, would plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. Prosecutors said that Ms. Wang published propaganda on a purported news site under direction from Chinese officials. She has resigned. Ms. Wang’s lawyers emphasized in a statement that the actions took place before Ms. Wang ran for public office.
And on Wednesday, Lu Jianwang, a Chinese American community leader in New York, was convicted of illegally working as a foreign agent. He had been accused of running a secret police station in Manhattan that reported on political dissidents at the direction of the Chinese government.
John Carman, Mr. Lu’s lawyer, had said that his work was limited to helping immigrants renew their Chinese driver’s licenses. The laws, he said, “are written in such a fashion that they capture both those intending to do good deeds and bad.”
Over the years, there have been similar cases of China’s political meddling, and analysts have said there is a pattern in which Beijing recruits Chinese immigrants to infiltrate governments or to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad and other critics of the government.