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China Collapsed Five Time Zones Into One and Never Looked Back

To buy a petrol car in Beijing you must first win a lottery.

The city introduced a licence plate quota in 2011 to slow vehicle growth and smog. Plates are allocated by public draw, and the odds have collapsed steadily ever since. In January 2011 an applicant had roughly a 9.4% chance. By December 2012 it was 1.4%. By 2018 it was 0.2%.

In one round in June 2018, more than 2.8 million people competed for 6,333 plates — odds of 1 in 2,031. The conventional-car quota had been cut from 90,000 for 2017 to under 40,000. Permitted annual registrations fell from 240,000 to 100,000.

The average time in the queue is 26 months. The electric vehicle waiting list has run past 400,000 people, with those at the back told to expect up to eight years.

An entire secondary economy grew around this. Agencies emerged to connect buyers with existing plate holders — reportedly around $15,650 for an electric plate and $22,700 for a petrol one. Some people register cars in a spouse's name, and marriages contracted specifically for this purpose have been reported at roughly $2,845 a year, or $9,816 for five years. Others buy plates from outside Beijing for around $250, rent them from dealerships, or buy second-hand cars that come with one attached.

There is a genuinely strange finding buried in the academic literature. Because the average wait is over two years, people build non-driving habits while they queue. One study found that after the standard 26-month wait, the probability of a winner actually switching to driving falls by 16% — cutting the city's annual vehicle mileage by 8.48 million kilometres.

The lottery works partly by taking so long that people stop wanting the prize.

The clock: Beijing rations two things centrally, and both produce the same response.

In 1949 China abolished its five existing time zones and put the entire country — some 5,000 kilometres wide — on a single clock, Beijing Time. In Kashgar, at the western end, the midwinter sun does not officially rise until around ten in the morning.

So Xinjiang quietly runs a second, unofficial clock two hours behind Beijing. It has no legal standing. Everyone uses it anyway, and the international time zone database carries an entry for it.

A licence plate lottery produces a market in fake marriages. A single national time zone produces a second national time. In both cases the official system holds, and a parallel one grows beside it.

China is about 5,000 kilometres wide, running from roughly 73° east to 135° east. That is wide enough for five time zones, and for thirty years it had exactly that.

From 1918, the Republic of China operated five official zones, established for railway and telegraph coordination:

• Kunlun — UTC+5:30
• Sinkiang–Tibet — UTC+6
• Kansu–Shensi — UTC+7
• Chungyuan — UTC+8
• Kungshan — UTC+8:30

Three hours from one end of the country to the other.

In 1949 the newly established People's Republic abolished all five and put the entire country on a single clock: Beijing Time, UTC+8. A State Council directive in May 1980 reaffirmed it. China has run on one time zone ever since — no regional variation, and no daylight saving apart from a brief experiment between 1986 and 1991.

For scale: the contiguous United States is about the same width and uses four zones. Russia uses eleven. China uses one.

The clock: the effect is most visible at the western end.

In Kashgar, in Xinjiang, the sun in midwinter does not come up until around 10 o'clock in the morning by the official clock, and sets around half past seven in the evening. People wake in the dark, eat breakfast in the dark, and begin the working day before sunrise, because the clock on the wall says it is time.

In practice, a second, unofficial time is widely used in Xinjiang — Xinjiang Time or Ürümqi Time, set two hours behind Beijing at UTC+6, which matches the local sun much more closely. It has no official standing. It is simply what a lot of daily life runs on.

The practical result is that people there routinely have to establish which clock a meeting time refers to. Long-term residents describe a standard habit: texting half an hour before an appointment to ask, politely, whether you are both thinking of the same hour.

And the world's software knows about both. The international time zone database carries `Asia/Shanghai` for the official national time — and also carries `Asia/Urumqi` at UTC+6, so that systems can represent a time that no government has ever formally recognised.

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