China time zone

[An Yang]

Dear Arthur,

Thanks a lot.

At first, let me show you some data:

Population of Beijing in 2011 is 22,634,722, data from
http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/population_of_beijing_in_2011
And population of Shanghai in 2011 is 22,447,529, data from
http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/population_of_shanghai_in_2011

And of cause, you can check the population of Beijing and Shanghai in
1996, Beijing is 2,069,722, and Shanghai is 1,188,721.

If your data source is
http://www.world-gazetteer.com/wg.php?x=1263073253&men=gcis&lng=en&des=gamelan&geo=-54&srt=npan&col=abcdefghinoq&msz=1500&pt=c&va=&srt=2npan
and http://www.citypopulation.de/world/Agglomerations.html
What I can say, the data is wrong absolutely.

The following is the data from the China Gov (Chinese only):
http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node2314/node2319/node12344/u26ai25463.html
http://www.bjstats.gov.cn/rkpc_6/pcsj/201105/t20110506_201580.htm

All of these data is different, what should we trust?
Let me try to explain it, frankly say, it's difficult to count the exact
population of a city which have more than 20,000,000, especially in
China.
The population data from government, it just include the people who have
the locale ID ( hukou ), do not include people without locale ID
(hukou).

So maybe 20-30% people lost, I think the data from
http://www.trueknowledge.com  is more accurate, which reflect the real
number of people who live in the city.

My conclusion is both Beijing and Shanghai are big city in China, and
have almost the similar populations.

According to the rule:
Among locations with similar populations, pick the best-known location,
e.g. prefer `Rome' to `Milan'.

I think the best-known location is Beijing, no matter from Chinese view
or from the foreigner's view.

I have read all the messages about Beijing Time in
ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz, and notice that all the voice
from China is the same, Beijing should represent China.

So trust the people who live there and use Beijing time everyday maybe
the best choice. 


Bests, 

An Yang

在 2011-06-29三的 06:30 -0400，Arthur Olson写道：

> I've added you to the time zone mailing list.
> 
> You may want to check out the old mailing list archives in...
>         ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz
> ...for past discussions of the Shanghai/Beijing matter (it does come
> up every few years).
> 
>         --ado


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