No puns, please. This is China.

That’s the message from the country’s media regulators, who on Thursday derided the use of wordplay in advertisements and broadcasts, saying they were “contradictory in spirit to the promotion and continuance of excellent, traditional Chinese culture.”

Examples cited by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, or SAPPRFT – whose dim view of language abuse evidently doesn’t include any reticence about long-winded names -- include slogans that have been previously used to promote tourism and medical treatment.

In one instance that the regulator condemned, the phrase “晋善晋美” was used in ads promoting tourism to Shanxi province, widely seen as the cradle of Chinese culture. The slogan -- translated as “Shanxi, a land of splendors”-- was a pun on the Chinese saying, “尽善尽美,” which means perfection. The ads swapped out the character “尽” for a homonym, “晋,” a character often used to represent Shanxi.

Such a spin on the phrase may seem innocuous compared to other, more political puns previously popularized in Chinese such caonima (草泥马), which refers to a fictional “grass-mud horse” but more cheekily sounds like an obscenity. Still, even mild efforts to have fun with the Chinese language are strictly taboo, says SAPPRFT.