I'm not an expert in this area, but here are my observations from a distance FWIW.

It seems like there's a problem with trying to find a "city in the region" for the national/official timezone - the region for that is the whole of china and the biggest city is Beijing. And according to the article (and other journalistic sources), people seem to orient to the "Xinjiang" (local) time and "Beijing" time.

On 7 Dec 2009, at 17:46, Eric Muller <emuller@adobe.com> wrote:

We already have a beijing time (or at least a PRC time). We need a Xinjiang time. Why have a Wulumuqi time at all? There is no "separate wulumuqi timezone".

On 7 Dec 2009, at 17:55, Robert Elz <kre@munnari.OZ.AU> wrote:

   Date:        Mon, 7 Dec 2009 22:45:33 +0600
   From:        Luther Ma <ma.lude.xj@gmail.com>
   Message-ID: <C447F652-CB6B-4518-B009-83898D10C41A@gmail.com>

| One thing I wonder about is exactly what "zone" refers to. The reason
| I ask is that Han living in Xinjiang would not say that they are in
| the Urumqi (or Wulumuqi) zone as far as time is concerned. Does it
| refer instead an area and population center first and then to a time
| zone second?

It is (except in a few rare cases that cause problems, mostly in South
America I think) the Anglophile name of the biggest population centre
(city or town) within the same country, that has a particular wallclock
time (and history).

Timezones themselves tend not to actually have names in many places,
it is just "the time" - but cities and towns generally always have names,
and it is very rare for a single city or time to have two different
timezones (the ones under discussion being one odd case.)

kre