According to The Los Angeles Times, China’s media regulator—the State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television—has issued an order that restricts the media from using puns and other forms of wordplay.

The media regulator’s website says that puns could mislead Chinese youth away from traditional Chinese cultural values, leading to “cultural and linguistic chaos.” President Xi Jinping agreed with the media regulators’ move, saying in a speech that art must “uphold the Chinese spirit.”

Puns are, however, particularly abundant in Chinese due to the language’s many homophones, and the Internet age has only increased their number. A new euphemism for censorship, for example, is the term for “river crabs” which sonically echoes the word “harmony.” Read about other Chinese puns that have proliferated on the Internet at Quartz and China Digital Times.

Some believe the move is a reaction to jokes about China’s political leadership. “I wonder if this is not a preemptive move, an excuse to crack down for supposed ‘linguistic purity reasons’ on the cute language people use to crack jokes about the leadership or policies,” said David Moser, an academic director for CET Chinese Studies at Beijing Capital Normal University, to The Guardian. “It sounds too convenient.”

Wang Xiaoyu, former dean of the School of Communications at East China Normal University, suggested that the ban on puns will not result in a drastic decrease of wordplay altogether. “Maybe in the short term, no one wants to be the one [to flout] the government’s new rule,” she said. “But I don’t think the rule can stop similar tweaking of words to be used in future commercials.”