Earlier this month, Fan Bingbing, China’s most famous actress, also apologized on Weibo after being fined nearly $70 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. In her statement, she said she owed her success to the policies of the ruling Communist Party.

The Yang incident comes at a time when the Chinese government, under President Xi Jinping, has stepped up demands for patriotic devotion even in areas of life that are typically seen as apolitical. Last year, for example, a large number of Chinese celebrity gossip blogs were taken down as part of the Communist Party’s push to spread “positive energy” and “socialist core values.”

In mainland China, where nationalistic sentiment runs high and space for public debate is shrinking, there has been little discussion of the National Anthem Law since its implementation.

By contrast, conduct surrounding the national anthem has been a subject of heated debate in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city with broad protections for freedom of speech. Amid discontent with what many residents see as Beijing’s growing influence in the former British colony, some spectators have taken to booing and catcalling the anthem when it is played before soccer matches in Hong Kong.

Last year, the National People’s Congress in Beijing, China’s rubber-stamp legislature, demanded that Hong Kong adopt the National Anthem Law. But the law has yet to be enacted in Hong Kong, which retains a degree of legal autonomy from the mainland under a framework known as “one country, two systems.” As a result, spectators have continued to boo the anthem without being punished, most recently at a soccer match between Hong Kong and Thailand last week.