To evade the censors, Chinese tennis fans have started to use obscure references to call more attention to Ms. Peng’s silence. Instead of identifying her Chinese name and specifying the details of her allegations, some people have used vague references like “a tennis player” and “the spat.”

There was a seemingly unrelated post about art that used the expression “hitting an egg against a rock.” It echoed a line in Ms. Peng’s original allegation, in which she wrote that going up against someone as powerful as Mr. Zhang was like “hitting a rock with an egg.”

Even state media figures have found themselves challenged by how to discuss Ms. Peng without setting off alarms. Commenting on Twitter, which is banned in the country, Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of the Chinese Communist Party’s official state newspaper, referred to Ms. Peng’s accusations as “the thing people talked about.”