UTC to China

About Coordinated Universal Time

UTC never shifts. It is the reference every other zone is defined against, which is why logs, flight schedules and protocol timestamps use it. GMT is the same clock for every civil purpose, so a query for one is answered by the other.

Cities on this clock: Reykjavik, Accra, Abidjan, Dakar.

Watch out: GMT is also used loosely to mean "UK time", and those are not the same thing for seven months of the year — the United Kingdom moves to BST (UTC+1) while UTC stays put.

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.

How the difference is worked out

Neither Coordinated Universal Time nor China Standard Time moves its clock relative to the other, so china standard time is 8 hours ahead of coordinated universal time is a rule rather than a fact about one particular year. The hour-by-hour table above holds on every date.

With both zones on their own standard time — daylight saving not in force anywhere — China Standard Time is 8 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal 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 UTC and Asia/Shanghai. Nothing is looked up on a server and nothing about your visit is recorded.