It always seems to be a bit confusing to figure out exactly what time it is in China if you’re not used to doing that calculation. Part of that is due to the fact that they don’t have a daylight savings time over there, so when the time switches in the US, the difference changes accordingly. Currently China time is 16 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time in the United States (13 hours ahead of EST). This holds true until we switch our clocks ahead one hour for daylight savings time, during the summer months, in which China is 15 hours ahead of PST (12 hours ahead of EST).
The nice thing is that even though China has about as much geographical girth as the US, they only use one time zone! Relative to the sun, this time zone is roughly calibrated to the Eastern coast (near Beijing and most of China’s big/modern cities), so if the sun is rising at 6am in Beijing it won’t rise until about 9am in the western part of the country. At the western tip, China’s direct neighbors to the south in Pakistan are a full 4 hours behind their border city brothers!
Usually, you’re only going to need this information if you’re trying to call somebody in China, so instead of doing all the calculations each time, it is probably easiest to just remember that if you are in Pacific Standard Time you can start trying to make the call after 5pm your time and you’re likely not to wake anybody out of their peaceful slumber. For a cool reference map of the world’s timezones, you can check out this page here.
