Have you ever heard of the single Chinese time zone (GMT+8)?

Have you ever heard of the single Chinese time zone (GMT+8)?

Well then, the point is that despite the country's large longitudinal extension, China even uses the time zone throughout the country as a symbol of national unity. The standardization of the legal time was one of the first measures adopted by the Government of the PRC (People's Republic of China) in 1949, that is, what was previously divided into five time zones, became something unique, based in the east of the country (Beijing) which is in the eight-hour advance of the Greenwich Meridian. And what are the implications of this system, is it beneficial?

"Keeping Beijing's time all over the country is very expensive, from an economic point of view, but in these aspects, which have ideological implications, the Chinese Communist Party is still very rigid.

Unidentified Western Analyst

What happens in practice is the following: when the sun rises on the east coast of China, for example, it is still dark in the regions of Xinjiang (located near Central Asia), in the northwestern region of the country, or even the famous Tibet, located in the Himalayas. This is due to the fact that the difference between the two extremes is three hours (extreme west GMT +5) and (extreme east GMT +8). It is something like leaving western China and entering Afghanistan, automatically when you cross the border you gain three and a half hours, you leave China at noon and when you enter Afghanistan it is still nine o'clock in the morning.

However, due to the fact that most of the population live in rural areas and live a different way of life from these people, day-to-day life is regulated by sunrise and sunset, not so much by government clocks. People and services have adapted to the solar time, because instead of having lunch at 11:30am, they eat around 1:30pm and 2pm. Some people from other ethnic groups are also resistant to the fact. As well as schools, jobs, meals everything is later. As it is a Muslim majority region, they do this to assert themselves.

Some make a point of setting the clocks by the time of the sun and not by Beijing time. "In Xinjiang, you can guess a person's ethnicity by the time the watch marks.

Anthropologist Ildik Beller-Hann

Comparison with the Brazilian time zone

While China adopts this model as seen in the first image, Brazil theoretically respects the model established by the conference in Washington in 1884, which established 24 meridians on Earth. Despite this, the country's main economic, tourist and political centers are aligned around the time zone (GMT -3), not to mention that Brazil has also been subject to summer time, which produced some regional differences.