Must-Read: : Despotic Rulers Who Display Their Muscle to Turn Back Time: "Adopting inconvenient time zones for symbolic reasons begins to look like insecurity...
...After the Communist takeover in China in 1949, Mao Zedong imposed Beijing time nationwide. China now has one timezone covering latitudes where Russia has five.... [Today] introducing a new zone might look like a concession to the repressed discontents in the western region of Xinjiang.... Similarly, India combined several imperial time zones into one after... 1947, and then underlined the point by setting it an awkward five and a half hours ahead of London time. This wastes electricity, and farmers in Assam in India’s far east have to use an informal ‘tea garden time’.... Hugo Chávez set Venezuela’s clocks back half an hour in 2007, putting them out of kilter with its neighbours, for no apparent reason but cussedness. The most entertaining example is Spain, [which is] in the same zone as Poland... the legacy of the deep cunning of Francisco Franco.... Realising the symbolic importance to fascism of uniformity in everything, he made the magnificently pointless gesture of adopting Berlin time. (A reminder: Hitler committed suicide as his Reich imploded in 1945; Franco died peacefully in office 30 years later.)
