Hi Paul,

Thanks for your feedback.

在 2011-07-02六的 08:25 -0700，Paul Eggert wrote:

We have conflicting reports of whether Shanghai has more people than
Beijing.  The official Chinese figures (from the 2010 census) say
that Shanghai has more people; apparently some sources (which I
haven't looked into) say the reverse.  In a situation like this
I'm inclined to leave the names alone.  This is in accordance
with the line in the "Theory" file that says "Do not change
established names if they only marginally violate the above rules".
(In this case, it's not even clear that the existing name violates
the rules.)

The official Chinese figures (from the 2010 census) only include the people who have local ID(hukou 户口), it do not reflect the population of a city.
If the population of a city means how many people lives in the city, the real number is much more than the data released by China gov.
For example, construction workers, home maid, even restaurant waiters, and other low level works, most of them do not have local ID(hukou 户口).
They work in the city, but was not included in the released data, these people maybe occupy more than 20% of the population of Beijing.

I hope I can explain these data, and of cause, if you are really want to know the real population of Beijing and Shanghai, you can come to China, I'm glad to be your guide, you can see what I see, feel what I fell.
My suggestion is you can just treat these data as a reference, but not judge dependencies.
I think it's a history mistake, as a result of miss understanding of China, that's not your fault, just in 90's of last century, you can touch very few real data from China.

Let's forget the detail rules, focus on the the original goal of tzdata, which let people in different timezone know where the are exactly, but Asia/Shanghai confuse most Chinese and foreigners(please let me assume that most foreigner know Bejing-:).

If you insist on Asia/Shanghai, I can promise that somebody in China will ask the same question again and agian in the nonstop future.
I beg you let's save the life of both you and me, stop the endless and bothering discussion.

If you insist on the stable of tzdata, I can understand it absolutely.
I think the best choice between you and me, is keep Asia/Shanghai and just add Asia/Beijing, you can split China into two region, North China and South China, both region has their own representation, that break nothing.

Sincerely,
An Yang

The name that 'TZ' uses for the time zone is somewhat arbitrary,
and need have nothing to do with the user interface for choosing
time zones, which surely ought to be using labels like "北京时间"
rather than anything in ASCII.