Dear Arthur, Thanks a lot. At first, let me show you some data: Population of Beijing in 2011 is 22,634,722, data from http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/population_of_beijing_in_2011 And population of Shanghai in 2011 is 22,447,529, data from http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/population_of_shanghai_in_2011 And of cause, you can check the population of Beijing and Shanghai in 1996, Beijing is 2,069,722, and Shanghai is 1,188,721. If your data source is http://www.world-gazetteer.com/wg.php?x=1263073253&men=gcis&lng=en&des=gamel... and http://www.citypopulation.de/world/Agglomerations.html What I can say, the data is wrong absolutely. The following is the data from the China Gov (Chinese only): http://www.shanghai.gov.cn/shanghai/node2314/node2319/node12344/u26ai25463.h... http://www.bjstats.gov.cn/rkpc_6/pcsj/201105/t20110506_201580.htm All of these data is different, what should we trust? Let me try to explain it, frankly say, it's difficult to count the exact population of a city which have more than 20,000,000, especially in China. The population data from government, it just include the people who have the locale ID ( hukou ), do not include people without locale ID (hukou). So maybe 20-30% people lost, I think the data from http://www.trueknowledge.com is more accurate, which reflect the real number of people who live in the city. My conclusion is both Beijing and Shanghai are big city in China, and have almost the similar populations. According to the rule: Among locations with similar populations, pick the best-known location, e.g. prefer `Rome' to `Milan'. I think the best-known location is Beijing, no matter from Chinese view or from the foreigner's view. I have read all the messages about Beijing Time in ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz, and notice that all the voice from China is the same, Beijing should represent China. So trust the people who live there and use Beijing time everyday maybe the best choice. Bests, An Yang 在 2011-06-29三的 06:30 -0400，Arthur Olson写道：
I've added you to the time zone mailing list.
You may want to check out the old mailing list archives in... ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz ...for past discussions of the Shanghai/Beijing matter (it does come up every few years).
--ado