A Clumsy Embrace for Another Western Custom : China on Daylight Time--Sort Of

China on Sunday embraced another Western custom, daylight saving time, and in the process demonstrated once again how remarkably difficult it can be to impose even the most modest change upon this tradition-bound society.

At 2 a.m. Sunday, a quarter of the world’s population leaped ahead by an hour. Although many other nations have employed this energy-saving technique for decades, it was the first time ever for this country, which hopes to save 1.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually by the time change.

For the last two weeks, newspapers and television stations have been exploring the possible effects of the new time on everything from the human digestive system to individual work habits to the regional divisions between northern and southern China.

‘Beneficial to Health’

“Although mealtimes will be earlier during daylight saving time, the time from meal to meal will not change,” the Peking Evening News assured its readers, quoting a professor of physiology who solemnly concluded that the time change would be “beneficial to health.”

On Sunday morning, China’s omnipresent outdoor loudspeakers--those tinny, static-filled devices that in days past filled the air with revolutionary slogans from Mao Tse-tung--were put to work reminding the nation of the need to reset clocks and watches.

But there are always some among China’s 1 billion people who manage to miss or tune out the official exhortations.

“What time does this train leave?” asked a tattered and weather-beaten man at midday Sunday after finally shoving and elbowing his way to the window of the jammed information booth at Peking’s railway station. “It already left,” explained the woman behind the counter pleasantly.

Some Problems Cited

A railway official at the station acknowledged that there had been “some problems” Sunday because of the time change, but he insisted that they were not too serious.

The transportation problems were not solely the fault of errant individuals forgetting to adjust their watches. Chinese authorities compounded the difficulties by creating a patchwork system of scheduling adjustments.

Airplane schedules were moved ahead by an hour, so that any plane scheduled to leave at 2 p.m. before the time change would take off at 3 p.m. under daylight time. But Chinese trains, boats and buses kept to their same schedules, so a train that regularly left at 2 p.m. before daylight saving time would still depart at 2 p.m. afterward.

Some reasons were offered for the different approaches. Authorities explained that China’s airline timetables are closely interconnected with international schedules and could not be adjusted for the new daylight time.

Power of Bureaucracies

But the variations also reflected the fact that plane, train and boat schedules are all set by different bureaucracies. In modern-day China, the huge government ministries have the sort of power and autonomy once held by regional warlords.

To compound the problem, the ministries and the Chinese news media seemed to compete with one another to see who could come up with the most confusing explanation for the time change.

“Domestic trains and water transport lines will be run according to daylight saving time. Passenger boat schedules will be according to tides,” one Shanghai newspaper said last week. “(Aviation) schedules in actuality won’t change, but because national time is changing, flight arrivals and departures will be one hour later. . . . Greenwich Mean Time must be emphasized to crew and passengers, along with how to calculate the appropriate Peking time.”

The anxiety aroused by such explanations was so great that newspapers began trying to calm the public.

Effect on Sleep

One article in the Guangming Daily, China’s main newspaper for intellectuals, was entitled “Don’t Worry About Daylight Saving Time.” It sought to answer such questions as whether the time change might affect the sleeping habits of people in South China who generally go to bed later in summer months because it is cooler then. (The paper answered that the change would not matter much and that, at any rate, the whole country needs to be united in the time change.)

Although it is 3,000 miles wide, all of China is in a single time zone. In the far western province of Xinjiang, however, local residents are increasingly permitted to use their own local time, two hours behind that in Peking.

As a final touch, the central People’s Broadcasting Station acknowledged last week that there is one place where implementation of daylight saving time will be somewhat delayed.

No Change in Taiwan

“Because China’s Taiwan province cannot be incorporated with the mainland in using the summer daylight saving time for the moment, the station’s programs to Taiwan will remain unchanged,” the broadcast declared.

Whatever mainland Chinese listeners there are on Taiwan “will have to add an hour to the time listed in the current program schedule when they tune in,” the station said.

By all signs, the confusion should be straightened out within a few days, and China can then begin working on a return to the normality of standard time. On Sunday, Sept. 14, Chinese clocks and watches will be set back once again.