She also appeared last month in a teaser on Instagram for “355,” a film shepherded by the actress and producer Jessica Chastain. Ms. Fan’s role in the film — an action thriller featuring women playing foreign agents from around the world — had been in limbo since the scandal. Many of her projects still are.

One of her last movies, “Air Strike,” was blocked from Chinese theaters and has languished in on-demand obscurity elsewhere. Luxury brands that dropped or distanced themselves from her have been slow to come calling again.

After she participated in a poetry reading in Beijing last month, reaction online was harsh. “Our country should not let these type of people affect our next generation,” one commentator wrote.

As her comeback attempt unfolds, the damage done to her own reputation, and to an industry China wants to use to project soft power around the globe, can start to be calculated.

In October, China revealed that Ms. Fan had been fined nearly $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties, while her eponymous studio was hit with a tax bill exceeding $60 million. That same month, in her first public statement since June, Ms. Fan expressed her remorse.

She was spared criminal charges, but her manager at the time, among others, was arrested. Despite her celebrity, or perhaps because of it, the authorities made an example of her at a time when the government is also cracking down on the internet, on investigative journalists and even earrings and tattoos judged to be in conflict with “core socialist values.”