China hasn’t always had one time zone. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the newly-empowered government established five different time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the government consolidated control of the country, the Chairman decreed that all of China would henceforth be on Beijing time for the purpose of national unity.
Given the state of the nation in those days, the Chairman’s reasoning was legitimate: Just two decades before, China was a fragmented country with large swathes beyond the de facto control of the central government. And this decision to unify the whole country under one-time zone was hardly unprecedented: newly-independent India, for example, had instituted a similar policy just two years before.