What Time is it Anyways?

I don't know what time it is. Not literally, there's a clock on my computer but time has an odd meaning out here. China despite being almost exactly the same size as the US, and therefore larger than the continental US, has only one time zone. Why that is exactly is a little unclear. If you ask them Chinese people will say something about making things easier, and I guess in some respects it does, but the US doesn't seem to be suffering too much with four time zones in the continental US. The real reason has some to do with just not caring about people further West, China is, both now and historically, a country focused on the Eastern seaboard. The West, especially the far West is the area with less development and a lot of pesky minorities. Also I believe this has something to do with the one China mania which is the most central tenant of the Communist Parties dogma. One China, one time zone.

The effects of this on life here are really strange. Time zones are always partially political, look at a map and you'll see that they follow the borders of countries quite a bit, so saying exactly what time zone Xinjiang should be in is a little hard. Probably though it should be two time zones over from Beijing so when it's 10am in Beijing it should be 8am in Xinjiang. This means that in Alaer the sun rises at around 8am and goes down at around 9pm. What this means in practice is that most things are just pushed about two hours later. In Changzhou my first class was at 8am here it's at 9:35, actually I think that changes to 10am in October. Lunch in Changzhou was around noon here it's 2pm. Dinner in Changzhou started at 5pm here it starts at 7pm or so. So you'd think this would be easy just subtract two hours to find the real time. In fact there is even an unofficial Xinjiang time which I told some of the Uyghurs use which is two hours different. But in practice it doesn't work out so well to just subtract two hours.

First it's a little complicated since they use 24 hour clocks, meaning that the clock shows 16:00 when it's 4pm which actually feels like 2pm. That can get a little confusing. Also not everything is pushed back two hours. The lights in the student dorms still go off at midnight just like in Changzhou, and most of the students get up at similar times, 7-8am even though that's often pre-dawn. On the other hard some people stay up much later as a result. Lake one of the Chinese teachers says he goes to bed at about 2am which is really more like midnight. In the end there are actually times when I'm looking at my watch trying to figure out if it's really late or early. I've also been going to bed much earlier even though I've been going to bed at my normal hours. This whole thing makes my head hurt.