“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again,” Wang Gang, a celebrity chef with more than 10 million online fans, pledged in a video message on Monday.

Every two weeks, Christina Dang buys a carton of 18 eggs from the Costco near her home in San Diego. Most of these eggs go into a snack she makes for herself when she comes home from work: egg rice.

“As a chef, I will never make egg fried rice again,” Wang Gang, a celebrity chef with more than 10 million online fans, pledged in a video message on Monday.

Wang’s video was solely about making egg fried rice, but for some Chinese nationalists, any mention of the dish around the anniversary of Mao Anying’s death or birthday on October 24 amounts ...