How People in Western China Handles Beijing Time

In some ways, the very concept of time is a social construct.  After all, it is by sheer convention of the centuries past that humans decided that, for instance, 7am means early morning and 7pm means dinner time.  The number could have been entirely something else had those who were in charge of creating standard time notations chose otherwise.  And because humans are so used to the idea of 7am and 7pm means the same thing everywhere, there came to be the idea of time zones.

But what if the whole world was instead on the same time zone while the same time simply means something completely different in different societies?  For example, if 7pm is dinner time in London, perhaps it can be the social norm that the same time of 7pm in Sydney just means breakfast time.  Surely, such an idea would be quite confusing for contemporary humans so accustomed to centuries of perceiving set times as the same in different geographies, but it would be fascinating to imagine a different way of thinking about time.

In the exercise, China can be unique case study.  Despite stretching for a few thousand miles east to west, China has only one time zone based on what is most appropriate for the city of Beijing.  Given that Beijing lies on the country's eastern seaboard, for the westernmost regions, using the Beijing time presents certain problems.  Indeed, as the author heads more and more westward, the problem of thinking about time in a set way has become more irrational.

A simply example is when the day starts and ends.  In Beijing, like elsewhere with the "normal" idea of time, 7am would be a rather normal time to see the break of dawn.  Yet out in Dunhuang, where the author currently is, sunrise does not occur until well past 8am.  Extending the same logic, nightfall might occur at 7pm or so in Beijing, but may not happen until 9pm or later during summer months here in western China.  Surely the discrepancy is bigger farther west in Xinjiang.

The problem here is that despite different times for sunrise and sunset, standard working hours remain the same.  If Beijing works the regular 9 to 5, then Dunhuang also needs to do the 9 to 5, albeit in Beijing time.  For people of Dunhuang to follow Beijing's working hours means that they need to sleep before getting dark, and rise even before sunrise on a regular basis.  Certainly that would be violating the basic circadian rhythms of the human body.

The solution has been for locals to adapt to living in the dark in the morning.  Stores and restaurants still open at 7:30 or 8 in the morning Beijing time, but are filled with people having breakfasts and doing morning shopping, despite the fact that it is pitch dark outside.  Unlike Chinese cities on the eastern seaboard, bright neon signs here are not just for drawing people at night but also for attracting them in the morning.  Locals do not seem to mind walking around in the dark every morning, month after month, year after year.

Instead of creating new definitions for what 7am means locally, the locals of Western China simply internalized the idea is that it is supposed to be dark when one wakes up in the morning.  In other words, rather than changing the social norms of how to tell time, they changed the social norms of what daylight and lack thereof mean for everyday living.  Perhaps locals secretly keep another time in mind (there is rumors of a "Xinjiang time") but they are used to playing by Beijing's time schedule.

As a method of social control, having only one time zone for the whole country is playing out rather alright for the Chinese government.  In the centuries past when no concept of time zones existed, and time was told by movement of the sun and the moon in the sky, no unified time across such a vast country would have been possible.  But the advent of new technologies that normalize time across vast distances allowed political authorities to create new sets of "common knowledge" that take in new intuitions with regard to the time they observe.

Of course, time is but a small nuisance for everyday living.  Having to get up in the dark and sleep in the light everyday are not irritating enough to trigger protests.  After all, plenty of people who work at night do exactly the same across the world.  Yet, to think that other projects to unify the country in top-down fashion can work as wonderfully as mandating the creation of only one time zone for the whole country certainly would not be nearly as effective.