China to CST

About China Standard Time

China runs a single clock, UTC+8, across roughly 60 degrees of longitude — the widest single-zone span of any country. In the far west that puts sunrise after 10:00 on the clock in midwinter. There is no daylight saving; the practice was dropped in 1991.

Cities on this clock: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Watch out: CST is also North American Central Standard Time (UTC−6). This page is the Chinese one — the two are fourteen hours apart.

About Central Time

Central Time covers the middle third of North America, from Manitoba down through Texas. It is UTC−6 as CST and UTC−5 as CDT, changing on the same dates as the other US zones — so the one-hour steps between Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern hold all year and never briefly collapse.

Cities on this clock: Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Nashville, Minneapolis, New Orleans.

Watch out: CST is also the abbreviation for China Standard Time, which is UTC+8 — fourteen hours away from this one. This page is the North American zone.

How the difference is worked out

The gap between China Standard Time and Central Time is not one number. The two zones change their clocks on different dates, so for part of the year the difference is 13 hours and for the rest it is something else — the table above lists each stretch of 2026 with the date it starts and which country's clocks moved.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — Central Time is 14 hours behind China Standard Time. That figure never changes; everything else on this page follows from it plus whichever clocks have moved.

Every figure here comes from the IANA time zone database via your browser's own Intl engine, using the zone ids Asia/Shanghai and America/Chicago. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.