Time zones in china

Your friend sends you a text message and tells you to meet him at 3 pm. Sounds pretty straight forward, time zones in china, right? Not in Xinjiang. If your friend is of China's majority Han ethnicity, you can assume that by 3 o'clock he's referring to Beijing Standard Time.

Kashgar is not located particularly far north — it is approximately at the same latitude as the Turkish capital, Ankara, where sundown is several hours earlier. But the sun goes down late in the Kashgar night because the Chinese Communist Party decided that all of China must operate in the same time zone as Beijing. Time zones are constructs that are constantly being renegotiated, and in few places has this been more true than in China and elsewhere in Asia. For as long as year-old Payzulla Zaydun can remember, time has been a point of contention between the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the authorities in Beijing. Therefore, many local shops and businesses in Urumqi also opened and closed following a two-hour time difference in adherence to the local time over Beijing time. Upholding the local time in Xinjiang is much more difficult today , Zaydun says. Canadian-Uighur activist Rukiye Turdush says enforcing the use of Beijing time in Xinjiang is just one of many ways the Chinese authorities are trying to dilute the Uighur identity , alongside means such as social control, large-scale surveillance and mass detentions.

Time zones in china

In a country the size of China, one would expect to find several time zones. However, the whole country observes the same local time. In theory, China could have five time zones, but the country has only one official time zone. In spite of being almost the same size as the continental USA, China has only one official time zone. Time zones are regions where the same standard time is used. Ideally, the globe is divided into 24 time zones, each of which spans 15 degrees longitude and differs by 1 hour from its neighbors. In China, the time zone is known as Beijing Time. Macau and Hong Kong are special administrative regions of China, and have the same UTC offset as the rest of the country. The time of day when the Sun is at its highest in the sky is called solar noon. If everyone only followed solar time, the Sun would always be at its highest in the middle of the day, at noon. The reason why solar time was globally abandoned in favor of time zones is that each longitude has its own solar time. This arrangement, a reality until the 19th century, proved increasingly impractical given the technological advances in transport and communication. Most countries observe a standard time that is as close as possible to their ideal time zone to ensure that solar noon occurs around 12 o'clock.

In most areas of Xinjiang, the opening time of local authorities is additionally modified by shifting the morning session 30—60 minutes earlier and the afternoon session 30 minutes later to extend the lunch break for 60—90 minutes, so as to avoid the time zones in china heat during noon time in the area during summer.

In s officials in Shanghai French Concession started to provide a time announcement service using the Shanghai Mean Solar Time provided by the aforementioned observatory for ships into and out of Shanghai. However, the time zone for the rest of China remained undetermined. Until , the official time standard for the whole of China was still the apparent solar time of Beijing, the capital of the country at the time. In the s, the proposed five time zones had not been fully observed, causing regions in inner China area to adopt their own time standards, resulting in chaos. Following the end of World War II , the five time zone system was resumed, although there is little information about the historical usage of time in the Kunlun and Changpai zones. Time zone changes in Tibet are undocumented, but Beijing Time was in use until at least the mids. Daylight saving time was observed from to , and from to

Your friend sends you a text message and tells you to meet him at 3 pm. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Not in Xinjiang. If your friend is of China's majority Han ethnicity, you can assume that by 3 o'clock he's referring to Beijing Standard Time. The reason for this confusion is simple: China, a country that is of roughly similar size to the continental United States, has one time zone: Beijing Standard Time. Allison Schrager, in her widely circulated article from last week advocating that the continental U. Or for the sun to rise there in the winter around 10 AM. In order to accommodate people inconvenienced by the time zone change, shops and restaurants in Xinjiang often adjust their hours—but the effect can still be disorienting for the unaccustomed traveler. China hasn't always had one time zone.

Time zones in china

Learn Chinese in China or on Zoom and gain fluency in Chinese! China spans more than 3, miles 5, km from east to west and shares borders with 14 countries means. You may wonder, then, how China possibly only has one official time zone. Read on! Table of Contents. Learn Chinese with CLI. If you thought that the midnight sunrise was the exclusive preserve of the Nordic countries then think again. One small step for man, one giant three-and-a-half-hour leap for mankind. But just how did Chinese time get into this strange position?

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However, the whole country observes the same local time. Not in Xinjiang. The jigsaw puzzle that makes up the map of time zones across borders and around the world reflects the many political considerations and histories at play in the creation of clock time. Archived from the original on 21 December Southern Weekly in Chinese. Or for the sun to rise there in the winter around 10 AM. When a time is mentioned in conversation between Han and Uyghur, it is necessary to either explicitly make clear whether the time is in Xinjiang Time or Beijing Time, or convert the time according to the ethnicity of the other party. In any event, the Tiananmen episode seems assured to worsen an already tense situation in Xinjiang. In eastern areas, solar noon is before 12 o'clock. Los Angeles Times. EthnoTraveler Magazine. For most people in China, the single time-zone is at most a mild inconvenience, a scheduling quirk that simply requires a little adjustment. For example, in Fushun , the year's earliest time of solar noon is am. In spite of being almost the same size as the continental USA, China has only one official time zone. Retrieved 26 March

Want to see the time in China compared with your home?

Nepal has aligned its own time zone with the peak of the sacred Gaurishankar Mountain, located east of Kathmandu, which places the country within a quarter-hour time zone unlike most other states that position their time keeping within a certain hourly time zone or more rarely within a half-hour time zone. And this decision to unify the whole country under one time zone was hardly unprecedented: newly-independent India, for example, had instituted a similar policy just two years before. Some local Xinjiang authorities now use both time standards side by side. But in , as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong decreed that all of China would henceforth be on Beijing time for the purposes of national unity. Not in Xinjiang. China hasn't always had one time zone. For example, in Fushun , the year's earliest time of solar noon is am. Over the last six decades, Uighurs have chafed under Beijing policies that have restricted their ability to study in their language and practice their Islamic faith and rendered it difficult for them to cope in a Han-dominated Chinese society. Contents move to sidebar hide. In and , Hong Kong and Macau were transferred to China from the United Kingdom and Portugal respectively, being established as special administrative regions. Kashgar is not located particularly far north — it is approximately at the same latitude as the Turkish capital, Ankara, where sundown is several hours earlier.