Wanying “Heather” Zhang — the jet-setting Southern California realtor who was arrested by the FBI at LAX on Sunday for allegedly spying for China — is just the tip of the iceberg of a growing network of US-based individuals doing the Communist Party’s bidding.

In the last year alone, Beijing has been accused of recruiting at least 10 people to spy for the regime as the CCP ramps up its espionage campaign on American soil.

“We are seeing a genuine increase in Chinese espionage activity in the US,” Andrew Harding of The Heritage Foundation told The Post.

The policy analyst believes the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is conducting espionage in the US on an “industrial scale” with its Ministry of State Security (MSS) service.

“Businesses are being targeted, Chinese students are pretending to come in for education to get into specialized courses so they can translate it back and so called tourists are finding their way to sensitive military sites and sending photos,” he told The Post.

“A key way they will conduct espionage is through Chinese-American communities and groups which are sympathetic to the state … this is just the start. Stealing trade secrets and academic research are all part of the Chinese playbook,” he noted. “It is a whole party effort by the CCP to undermine the American way of life and threaten American innovation and dominance.”

Zhang’s arrest comes just five months after the former mayor of Arcadia, Calif., Eileen Wang, 58, pleaded guilty to illegally acting as an agent for the CCP. She faces up to 10 years in prison.

She laid the blame on her former fiancé Mike Sun, 65, for deceiving her after the pair worked with the PRC to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil aimed at Chinese Americans between 2020 and 2023. He was sentenced to four years in prison in February.

At the direction of CCP officials, he helped “orchestrate” Wang’s 2022 election victory and subsequently submitted detailed reports to Chinese intelligence detailing how they had successfully “cultivated” a new “political star” friendly to the Chinese government, according to his plea agreement.

Meanwhile, last month in Virginia, American journalist and Texas native Thomas Weir Pauken II was sentenced to two years in prison for acting as an agent of the Chinese government inside the US.

According to prosecutors, the 51-year-old, who received at least $100,000 from China for his work, attempted to supply a potential spy seeking a job in the Trump administration with a laptop, phone and $10,000 to write reports to be read by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

At the beginning of the year in San Diego, former US Navy sailor Jinchao Wei was sentenced to 16 years for selling sensitive ship information to the Chinese government for $12,000 under the encouragement of his mother.

In 2025, Chinese-American pro-democracy activist Yuanjun Tang, 69, pleaded guilty to spying on fellow dissidents in New York for the Chinese government. That same year, British businessman John Miller, 64, and his Chinese “handler” Cui Guanghai, 44, were charged with stalking, smuggling and illegal arms export after they tried to silence a Chinese expat living in Southern California who spoke out against leader Xi Jinping.

Miller and Cui fled to Serbia where they were apprehended by local authorities and forced to wear ankle monitors under house arrest before they somehow escaped while awaiting extradition to the US.

Former CIA officer and acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency David Shedd insists that China’s spy network in the US is “very widespread”.

“The brazenness of the Chinese is on the increase,” he told The Post. “So much is at stake for them to surpass us as an international power. [Chinese agents] are at the federal state and local levels because influence matters.”

Shedd said he has seen China “become a first-world intelligence espionage service” as they’ve “significantly improved” their spying techniques.

“I am most worried about their flexibility and nimbleness to conduct espionage in all sorts of forms and the commitment from them to inherently go after us,” he said.

Human rights expert Yaqiu Wang, who left China for the US in 2009, said the PRC is “making more of an effort to crack down on people” and doing whatever it takes to pressure Chinese-Americans to comply.

“There are people being forced to do it because their families back home are being threatened,” she noted. “I personally know many people in America who are being harassed, followed and subjected to cyber attacks by China …There are people the CCP just recruits as informants, people in the US who want to curry favor with the Chinese government, voluntarily providing information.

She added, “The US government is not doing enough to protect people and investing resources in putting a stop to it.”

Shedd agrees.

“We are underestimating the scale of China’s intelligence network in America,” he said. “They are interested in every aspect of American life and penetrating it.”