A mysterious thing has happened in Beijing in the past few weeks. Most of the city’s billboards have been whitewashed or torn down.

This is no small thing. The city has huge construction projects, and many of them have high walls that serve as billboards. No more. All white.

It’s quite a shock. After all, this is a country awash in commercialism. Nearly every elevator waiting area has a TV screen with constant advertisements. Get in a taxi in some Chinese cities and a mini TV screen airs ads constantly.

I’ve been holed up in my office most of the week writing. But I got out and about today, and I found it extraordinary. I asked my office assistant to locate the first report she could find about the rationale for what is happening. She found this in the China Times of June 6:

“The Beijing Municipal government is undertaking a campaign to clear out all the outdoor billboards on the city's main roads, dismantling those already set up by private companies. The work was started last year, when companies were asked to dismantle illegal billboards themselves. Since this April, employees of the city's administration started to tear down the remaining ones by force. It took them a whole week to dismantle an 86-meter-long, seven-meter-high billboard on the Third Ring Road, the biggest one in Beijing.”

It’s as if an all-powerful queen reigned here and suddenly snapped her fingers: Make all the billboards disappear!

In this case, the queen is the Communist Party. When it issues an edict, things happen.