American woman arrested on suspicion of spying for China: Chinese official secretly made a video of Taiwan's president's family

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a woman from the Los Angeles airport on Sunday. She is accused of working for the Chinese government. According to the FBI, the woman secretly made a video of the family of the Taiwanese president's son. She was entrusted with this work by a Chinese official. The woman was arrested when she was about to board a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai. The arrested woman was working as a real estate agent in California. The arrested woman has been identified as Wenying Heather Zhang (34). She is a real estate agent in Irvine, California. According to U.S. officials, Zhang traveled to Seattle with an associate in September 2025 to monitor the home of Taiwanese President Lai Ching and his son Ting-Yu Lai, and took photos and videos there. According to the complaint filed by the FBI on October 3, 2025, Zhang and another person arrived in Seattle from Las Vegas on September 1, 2025. They rented a black Nissan Rogue car there and approached the home of the president's son. Images from a neighbor's security camera showed the two making videos. According to the FBI, Zhang sent a message on WeChat to an alleged Chinese government official saying that he had seen Ting-Yu. She also wrote that she was recording the video and sent the numbers of the two cars. FBI agent Kevin Holt wrote in the complaint that Zhang had been in contact with at least two people who worked for the Chinese government. The woman went to Changsha, China in June According to the FBI's complaint, in June 2025, a classmate from Zhang's old university introduced her to a Chinese government official. Zhang had booked a private room in the Chinese city of Changsha in June, where she allegedly met with that officer. According to the complaint, the officer assigned her a supervisory task. Zhang then said in a message that she would take over the job. The FBI says the WeChat messages were obtained through a warrant to search Zhang's iCloud account. FBI says the images could have been used to put pressure on the president FBI agent Holt said in the complaint that if China wanted to put pressure on the Taiwanese president during a potential conflict, pictures of the locations, homes and vehicles of his close relatives could be useful to him. Zhang's husband, Edrick Ding, who works for the same real estate company. He told the media that he was not yet aware of the case. The son of the Taiwanese president, who works for the Dutch company Philips, is an engineer and has studied in the United States. He graduated in electrical engineering from Case Western Reserve University in 2012. He then earned a master's degree in bioengineering from Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Washington. Ting-yu now works at Philips, a multinational electronics company in the Netherlands. According to Taiwanese media reports, his wife is also from Taiwan. The two got married in 2018 and their child was born in the United States in 2020. There have been cases of espionage linked to China in the past in the United States. 2024: A 75-year-old man named Shujun Wang was convicted of spying for China. He was accused of collecting information in support of China in New York and sending it to Beijing for 17 years. 2023: Two people associated with an alleged Chinese "police station" operating in New York were arrested. U.S. officials said it was used to keep an eye on Chinese critics. 2026: Former California Mayor Eileen Wang was accused of acting as an agent for China. According to officials, she took money in exchange for propaganda in support of China. Why is there tension between the United States and China over Taiwan? Taiwan considers itself a region with a separate and democratic government, while China considers it part of itself and has already said to take control of it by force if necessary. This is why there has been a long-standing tension between the United States and China over Taiwan. Taiwan is very important not only politically but also technologically. A large part of the world's most advanced computers and AI chips are made in Taiwan. The world's largest chip manufacturing company, TSMC, is also based here. Many American tech companies depend on chips made in Taiwan.