Funda Wang <fundawang@gmail.com> writes:
In fact, we do not have an official abbreviation for "The Time of Beijing", as we do not use English :)
OK, in that case we should probably stick with "CST", as it abbreviates the most commonly used English phrase for the time in China. The tz database is an English database, by and large. For example, it uses the abbreviation "CET" for Central European Time even though most residents of Central Europe use other abbrevations like "MEZ". We don't currently have the resources to localize all the abbreviations, so we stick with English ones. If and when the database is localized, we will transliterate "CST" in China to the appropriate Chinese characters (e.g., the characters for "The Time of Beijing").
the main reason that there should be a "Beijing" is that we call UTC+8 as "The Time of Beijing".
There is longstanding precedent in the tz database for decoupling tz zone labels from informal time zone names. For example, the tz label "Europe/London" denotes local time in England, even though the people in England call their local time "Greenwich Mean Time". The case of Beijing is somewhat similar.