The outcry over the luxury apparel also underscores the growing pressures faced by foreign companies that seek to do business in China. In recent months, Beijing appears to have increased its policing of how overseas companies refer to semiautonomous Chinese territories such as Hong Kong and Macau . Versace, Givenchy and Coach are the latest foreign companies to draw fierce criticism from consumers in mainland China over sovereignty sensitivities, and boycott calls and online backlashes have been on the rise in recent months.

Chinese shoppers are a top consumer group of luxury goods, accounting for at least a third of luxury sales worldwide and two-thirds of the luxury industry’s growth, according to figures from Bain & Company, a management consulting company.

The latest fallout began Sunday when images surfaced on Weibo of a black Versace T-shirt that paired cities next to apparently corresponding countries. “Macau, Macau” and “Hong Kong, Hong Kong” sat beside pairings such as “Beijing, China” and “Rome, Italy” on the back of the garment . Hong Kong is a semiautonomous territory under Chinese sovereignty, meant to maintain a range of freedoms; the gambling enclave of Macau is another special administrative region.

In a post published on its Instagram and Weibo account s, the Italian luxury house said that it had made a mistake, stopped selling the product and destroyed the remaining T-shirts on July 24.

“Versace reiterates that we love China deeply, and resolutely respect China’s territory and national sovereignty,” the company said in the statement, subsequently echoed by the designer Donatella Versace. The Chinese actress Yang Mi, who was a spokeswoman for Versace, later said she had terminated her contract with the company. “The motherland’s territorial integrity and sovereignty are sacred,” she said in a Weibo post.