A Short Day's Journey Into Night

Assume, for the sake of argument, that we did away with daylight savings time in the US.  And then, for good measure, we just eradicated time zones in general.  It'd certainly make things simpler, right?  You wouldn't have to account for time change when planning phone calls, flight connections, television programming -- many scheduling difficulties we accept as part of living in a country of such longitudinal girth would be rectified.  So why don't we do it?  Well, obviously, because it makes no astronomical sense.  Without time zones, the day would look a hell of a lot different in California than it would in New York.  The sun would rise and set in California not just three hours later in an absolute sense, but in a time sense as well.

As counterintuitive as this may sound, this is how it is here in China.  With only one time zone, it is currently 5:06 PM at the offices of J.D. Power in Shanghai, and it is also 5:06 PM in Lhasa, Tibet, some 4,200 kilometers west of here.  The result: it got dark at about 3:45 this afternoon.  By Christmas, I imagine that I'll be saying goodnight to the sun at around 3.  Of course, the reverse is true as well -- the sun rises at around 5am or before here.  In order to make a single time zone of such expansive width functional at all, the concept of a "day" in which sunlight and waking hours are at least somewhat closely aligned doesn't really exist in Shanghai, at least not as we approach the winter equinox.  I imagine the same is true for Tibet and Xinjiang in June, where the sun probably doesn't set until close to midnight.  All of this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, particularly considering there are industrialized countries out there like Sweeden that function on close to 24 hours of sunlight during the summer and darkness in the winter.  But, man, is it disconcerting to look out the window before 4pm and have it be night time already.

I heard a funny explanation of this phenomenon the other night  After complaining about it, someone said to me, "Trust the Chinese government to mandate at least nominal, Communist equality in everything -- even time."  The notion that two Chinese people could be experiencing different times of day at the same time is, I suppose, anathema to the ultimate notion of "One China."  It reminds me of my trip to the Shanghai Aquarium 4 years ago, when, upon asking the ticket agent if there was a student discount for the preposterously expensive tickets, I was told in Chinese that, "In China, everyone is equal."

Whatever the reason is, Yogi Berra must've been thinking of China when he announced, "It gets late early out here."