Why does China only have one time zone? China only has one official time zone because that is what Chairman Mao decreed in 1949 to promote unity in the newly formed People’s Republic of China.
The world is divided into time zones because of the speed at which the Earth rotates and the amount of time it takes for the sun to cross a certain area of land. The Earth rotates once every 24 hours, which means the sun crosses 15 degrees of the Earth per hour. That means that if it is noon in one location, the sun is one hour past noon 15 degrees to the east and one hour before noon 15 degrees to the west. This is why we need time zones. Theoretically, there should be 24 time zones, one for every hour or 15 degrees, but in fact there are 38. Some of them are only 30 or 45 minutes rather than a full hour.
There was no real need for standardized time until the invention and spread of the railways, and there was even less reason for ordinary people to worry about international time differences before the modern age. This is because most people did not own clocks, very few were concerned with exact time, and there was no way to get anywhere fast enough for the time difference to matter much. If someone went from London to New York, which has a five-hour time difference, in 1650, the journey would take roughly ten weeks. Nobody would be checking a wristwatch, and daily life would still be governed by the sun. By the time a traveler arrived, their habits would already have adjusted to local daylight.
When the train was invented, people could suddenly move across a country rapidly. England had no standardized time because noon was about 20 minutes later in the west than in the east. Before rail travel, that was not much of a problem because people lived by local time. Once trains began running on schedules, though, that changed. Timetables had to match from one town to another, so the whole of the UK gradually had to use London time. That was not a huge problem because the west was only about 20 minutes out. International travel still took so long that most people would not feel very concerned about time differences between countries. Later, with faster global travel, those differences became much more obvious and coordinated timekeeping became more important.
China is a vast country that stretches about 5,200 km from east to west. That is roughly 46 degrees on the Earth’s surface, meaning about three hours of difference in sunlight. When the sun is at noon in the center of China, the eastern side is about 90 minutes past noon, and the western side is about 90 minutes before noon. For a long time, official timekeeping in China centered on Beijing, but that was not much of a problem because very few people had clocks and many people who worked the land mainly cared about the position of the sun. As travel became faster and more people had watches, it became more of an issue. Five time zones were proposed in the 1930s, but different cities ended up using different local systems, which was confusing. The five time zones were then set to be used after the end of World War II.
Before the five time zones could really take hold, the government fell to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party wanted to create a more unified China, and one way it tried to do that was through timekeeping. The government decreed that all of China would operate on Beijing time.
Through a large part of the 20th century, many people in China were poor and worked the land. They did not use watches much and did not care very much what official time zone they were in. They rose with the sun, worked the land, and slept when the sun went down. As China became more prosperous and urbanized, people began to suggest that a single time zone was not necessarily a good idea. However, the government generally prioritized unity and control over regional convenience. In politically sensitive areas, even small policy questions can become tied to larger fears about stability and separatism. For that reason, China has continued to use a single official time zone. Whether or not it will ever return to multiple time zones is anyone’s guess. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China
https://velvetshark.com/how-many-time-zones-in-the-world
Photo by Ramaz Bluashvili: https://www.pexels.com/photo/chinese-flag-and-great-wall-of-china-in-beijing-31639349/