FW: About China time zones

[Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]]

I'm forwarding this message from Tom Korte, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the list, please direct replies appropriately.

(While all of China is now officially in one time zone there were different zones until 1980; that's why there are multiple entries in the database. The database started out life with an entry for Chungking; the entry was later changed to use the Pinyin spelling Chongqing, but a
Chungking link was kept for backward compatibility. And time zones are as a rule named for the city in the zone with the highest population--at the time the zone was named if not at present.)
				--ado

From: Walter Korte [mailto:Walter.Korte at tomtom.com] 
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:15
To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
Subject: About China time zones

To the maintainers of the tz database,

We are using the TZ database in our navigation SW, and we have had feedback from our users in China that the time zone city names included do not make sense to local users. Neither Harbin, Shanghai nor Chungking (this is a very strange spelling, it is spelled Chongqing in Pinyin) is used in China to indicate a time zone. It would make most sense to remove these 3 entries and replace them with a single Beijing entry in the database.

As HongKong and Macao are special administrative regions (SAR) in China, listing these makes sense.
For the cities listed that are located in Xinjiang (Kashgar and Urumqi), these should not be listed as China only has one official time zone. But in practice Xinjiang uses its own time zone so keeping these would be better.

Best regards,

Walter Korte
TomTom Asia