Clocks Square Off in Chinese-occupied Territory
OnIslam, 27 March 2014
Waking up every morning to a pile of emails sent from the Asia, Europe, and Africa makes me think about time zones. Living in California, it seems that we are behind virtually all the rest of world. All business phone calls must be made in the morning before offices close in other time zones. Such is the physical geography of time.
But to what extent do various parts of the world keep with astronomical time, I wondered? Math blogger and Google engineer Stefano Maggiolo answered that question by creating a map that shows the difference between “Solar Time” and “Clock Time” that is the discrepancy between the time when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and 12 noon as it is officially reckoned.
On Maggiolo’s map, places where the sun rises and sets later than the adjusted clock are shown in red, and those where the sun rises and sets earlier than the adjusted clock are shown in green. The deeper the shades, the farther off the local clocks are.
As Joshua Keating notes in his article in Slate.com, for various reasons, more of the world seems to be late rather than early, something which directly and effectively influence our daily life maybe without paying attention to it.
Many areas got off-real time because of the desire to maintain uniform time across their territory. This is the case, for example, in China, where all the clocks are set to Beijing time.
As a result, in far western Chinese-occupied Muslim Republic of Uyghurstan (East Turkestan) solar noon happens as late as 3 p.m., placing the occupied Muslim country in the “deep red” category.
Hence, and in defiance of the occupying Chinese government, many Uyghurs who are the native Central Asian Muslim inhabitants of Uyghurstan observe their own time regardless of the fake time of the Chinese occupying authority which contradicts with astronomical facts.
Chinese Occupation Also Stands Against Astronomical Facts
The clock in the lobby of the International Hotel in Kashgar, southwest Uyghurstan shows it is almost 11 p.m., too late for dinner and bad news for two hungry travelers.
Not to worry. Take an underpass to cross the wide main street of Kashgar, turn down a dusty alley of crumbling ocher storefronts that opens up into a lively public square behind a mosque. Families with children are watching television at an open-air restaurant. The scent of cumin wafts from a grill where lamb sizzles on skewers. Next door, a chef makes noodles strung between his hands like a game of cat’s cradle. Over here, it’s not quite 9 p.m.
Kashgar, a city of 350,000 built around an oasis along the old Silk Road, has two time zones, two hours apart. How you set your watch depends not only on the neighborhood, but on your profession and ethnicity, religion and loyalty. People living on both sides of the time divide say there is little confusion because they have as little to do with each other as possible.
Back in 1949 when Mao Tse-tung drove the Chinese army to occupy the Muslim-dominated country of Uyghurstan, he changed the name of the Muslim country from East Turkestan to “Xinjiang” and decreed that everybody should follow a single time zone, no matter that his empire extended to span over 61 longitudes.
But Uyghurs balked at running their lives on the time zone of Beijing the capital of the occupiers of their homeland, which would have them getting up in the pitch dark and going to sleep at sunset. “It is as ridiculous as having Los Angeles following New York time,” said Alim Seytoff, who left Uyghurstan in 1996 and is now secretary-general of the Uyghur American Association.
So the Uyghurs follow their own unofficial time, which is two hours earlier — in effect following the dictates of the sun rather than of Beijing, about 2,000 miles away.
The separate time zones are in fact a metaphor for the chasm between the native Uyghurs and the invader Han Chinese who were planted in Uyghurstan forcefully. Since 1949, the Chinese occupying authority immigrated millions of ethnic Han Chinese to raise their population in Uyghurstan from 9% to more than 40%, and Uyghurs accuse the occupying Chinese government of suppressing their culture and faith.
There is only minimal socializing between Uyghurs and Chinese. Uyghur men say they don’t go out at night with Chinese colleagues because they don’t share the habits of drinking and smoking. Intermarriage is rare. Few Chinese in Uyghurstan bother to learn the Uyghur language and they avoid Uyghur Muslim neighborhoods. (“Don’t go eat over there at night!” a Chinese employee at the hotel warns guests. “It’s full of Muslim people.”)
Because of the firm totalitarian Chinese occupation in Uyghurstan, schools, government offices, post offices all use Beijing time. So do the airports and railroad stations. Some bus lines use Uyghurstan time and others Beijing time. Local people have strangely adjusted.
“Confusing? Not confusing at all! You can ask anybody how easy it is to convert between Beijing time and the local time,” insisted a Chinese woman working at the Kashgar inter-city bus station, which is running on local time until April 1 and then switching over. “We use Beijing time in every aspect of our lives. It is only our comrades, the ethnic minorities, who use their local time,” the chauvinistic Chinese female settler shouted.
Ali Tash, a 28-year-old tour guide, said it’s really quite simple. Pointing at empty sofas in a hotel lobby, he explained how he would set up a hypothetical meeting with a Chinese friend and a Uyghur friend. “So I say to the Chinese guy, come at 4 o’clock, and to the Uyghur guy, come at 2 o’clock, and then everybody will be there the same time. No problem.”
The Invention of Modern Time Zones
International Date Line.
Modern time zones dividing the world into 15-degree-wide slices of longitude are a relatively recent invention, designed to stamp uniformity on the globe and make railroad travel more efficient. Until the late 19th century, the standard practice had been for each town to set its clocks to noon when the sun reached its zenith.
China is big enough to span five time zones but is the largest country in the world to insist on a single one. In contrast, Russia, the largest country in the world by area has 11 time zones.
“The reason goes back to a long Chinese imperial tradition in which the emperor is in control of time because it has a cosmological significance,” said James Millward, a Xin- jiang scholar at Georgetown University. Millward calls the Uyghurs’ insistence on using their own time a “classic weapon of the weak.”
“These are the kind of things that people do in authoritarian societies. Like telling a joke with a twist, it is a way of expressing independence that is subtle enough that you don’t get into trouble,” Millward said.
Uyghurs appear proud of keeping their own time. A Uyghur boy of about eight playfully grabbed the wrist of a foreign visitor in the market to look at her watch. Seeing that it was set to local time, he gave a big grin.
East Turkestan Local Time
The Chinese government has not always been so tolerant of chronological deviation. In 1968, Long Shujin, a hard-liner who was soon to be named Communist Party secretary for the occupied country renamed “Xinjiang”, issued a decree ordering the indigenous Uyghurs to stop using their own time, according to Gardner Bovingdon, an East Turkestan expert at Indiana University who recently completed a paper on the separate time zone.
But the Chinese government was not able to enforce the law and in 1986 published a small notice acknowledging that the unofficial time could be used. ‘If they really had forced people to synchronize their workdays with Beijing, it would have produced howls of protest because people would be getting up in the pitch dark,” Bovingdon said.
Indeed, at 9 a.m. Beijing time on a Monday morning, when one might expect people to be bustling with the urgency of the week ahead, the city was still yawning itself awake. The statue of Mao looming over People’s Square in the center of town was barely visible through a shroud of morning haze. Cars on the main road had their headlights on.
Kashgar is almost due north of New Delhi and about the same latitude as New York. Its problems with timekeeping are worse in midwinter, when the sun doesn’t rise according to a Beijing-oriented clock until past 10 a.m., and during the summer solstice, when sunset is close to 11 p.m.
Unofficially, the Chinese themselves have skewed their working hours, so most schools and many businesses don’t actually open until 10 a.m. Beijing time.
Jiang Lin, a student at Kashgar Teachers College, said: “Most people are using Beijing time; only local Uyghurs use Uyghurstan time. But our class starts two hours later than usual time. It’s quite easy to adapt to it, just as when you are in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Still, Uyghurstan time remains strictly unofficial. In the lobby of the Chinese-run International Hotel there are five clocks showing the time in Moscow, London, New York, Tokyo and Beijing. Asked why there was no clock indicating Uyghurstan time, the concierge replied with irritation: “There’s no need. They know what time it is.”
Abdul Hakim, a Uyghur watchmaker in the Kashgar market, said he used to stock a watch that displayed two different times, but nobody bought it. “People use one time or the other, not both. The Chinese use Beijing time. The Uyghurs use our time,” he said. “But if somebody buys a watch from me, I’ll set it however they like.”