If you look at a time zone map you’ll see that all of mainland China has one single time zone. That would be equivalent to everyone in the U.S. agreeing to use Eastern Standard Time.
How do people in the western provinces, astronomically as much as three or four hours behind Beijing time, deal with this situation? Doesn’t that mean that they have to start their “day” literally in the middle of the night? Do stores and offices in the West tend to start and end their business day later, more or less in keeping with astronomical time, or do they have to stick to Beijing’s schedule?
The Han Chinese aren’t very concerned about the inconvenience to barbaric minorities. Anyway, Peiching is the centre of the world. Why would anyone want to be on a different clock?
Everyone copes with the official Beijing time and the unofficial local time. I remember being in Lhasa in the summer and seeing stars outside at 8:00 am and it getting dark around midnight. i think 10:00 am was when they started their official kind of day
Conversely, every one in China queries about how confusing it must be to have different time zones.
The bulk of the Chinese population live in what would be an hour’s difference in the US I think. It’s not that far from the east coast to Sichuan.