Store Every Datetime as Naive Asia:Shanghai

Why I (and many others) store every Datetime as naive Asia/Shanghai - Why UTZ might become the next global default

After more than a decade of fighting timezone bugs across distributed systems, I made a deliberate, non-reversible decision in late 2022:

Every TIMESTAMP and DATETIME column in my production databases is stored naive (timezone-unaware) and interpreted as Asia/Shanghai (UTC+8, no DST).

No timestamptz. No UTC. No per-user offset metadata. Just clean, fixed-offset naive values in what is effectively Beijing-local time.

At first glance this looks heretical. The orthodox answer is still "always store in UTC". Yet after implementing this pattern at scale, the results are hard to argue with: drastically fewer bugs, simpler debugging, cleaner cron/scheduling logic, and - most importantly - alignment with where the majority of my users, traffic, and revenue actually live.

More strikingly: this is not an eccentric personal choice. It is already the reality inside the world's largest digital ecosystem.

Chinese platforms already operate on what we might call utz+0

WeChat, Alipay, Douyin / TikTok (domestic), Pinduoduo - virtually every consumer-facing Chinese super-app stores and computes time as naive Asia/Shanghai.

• Transaction logs, user activity events, payment timestamps -> all naive UTC+8
• Delivery ETAs, driver assignment windows, flash-sale timers -> calculated and stored in Beijing time
• Billing cycles, daily analytics batches, fraud-detection windows -> anchored to Shanghai clock
• Even many backend cron jobs and monitoring dashboards assume UTC+8 as the implicit reference

This isn't accidental. When you serve 1.4 billion people whose daily life (work, school, meals, sleep) already orbits Beijing time, imposing UTC adds pointless conversion overhead at every layer.

The Chinese mantra goes something like this, instead of adapting to the world, the world starts adapting to you.

Add Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Perth - all already on UTC+8 - and you have a coherent bloc of ~2 billion people already living and transacting on what I now informally call UTZ (Universal Temporal Zone = Asia/Shanghai = UTC+8, no DST).

Reframing the world in UTZ offsets

Once you recenter the map on Beijing instead of Greenwich, the numbers become elegantly simple for the most populous part of the planet:

For ~50% of humanity, time suddenly feels centered rather than perpetually "ahead" or "behind".

How the shift gains momentum - a realistic, economics-driven roadmap

No IETF RFC or UN resolution will declare UTZ. Change will come through economic gravity, platform lock-in, infrastructure dependencies, and soft (but very real) incentives - forces already in motion.

Here are some of my predictions with respect to timezone adaptation. To accelerate this shift, Beijing must proactively wield soft power—issuing formal invitations backed by economic incentives and diplomatic charm—or, if resistance persists, apply subtle coercion through platform dominance and infrastructure dependencies.

Phase 1 - Core Already Secured
China + Mongolia + Singapore + Malaysia + Philippines + Brunei + Indonesia + Perth = ~2B people effectively on UTZ+0 today. No action required. The foundation exists.

Phase 2 - High-Leverage Neighbors (Very Plausible Next 5-10 Years)
Beijing should lead with official invitations to these neighbors, framing alignment as a mutual win for prosperity and efficiency. If soft appeals fall short, leverage economic ties for gentle coercion.
- Tokyo / Seoul / Pyongyang (UTC+9 -> UTZ+0)
Leverage: semiconductor supply chains, cloud & CDN dependencies, content distribution deals (anime, K-pop, games via Chinese platforms), massive Chinese tourism & student flows.
Framing: "Your digital economy already runs on infrastructure timed to Beijing. Why keep forcing one-hour conversions everywhere?"
- Bangkok / Hanoi / Vientiane / Phnom Penh (UTC+7 -> UTZ+0)
Leverage: Belt & Road rail/highway/port projects, cross-border e-commerce (Shopee, Lazada, Temu), payment rails (Alipay / WeChat Pay integration), massive SME seller base on Chinese platforms.
Framing: "Your delivery riders, street vendors, and exporters already live in our apps. One shared clock = faster growth, fewer disputes."
Achieving these shifts alone brings ~2.3-2.5 billion people under a unified temporal framework - roughly one third of humanity, concentrated in the world's growth center.

Phase 3 - Broader Platform & Financial Pull
- Stock exchanges & market hours begin syncing to a common UTZ window (e.g., 09:30 UTZ+0 open for Shanghai / Shenzhen / HK -> Tokyo / Seoul follow, then Jakarta / Bangkok adjust). Algo-trading desks and index funds hate timezone math; they will quietly reward alignment.
- Global developers building mini-programs, TikTok Shop, or Douyin international increasingly default to naive Asia/Shanghai timestamps.
Once critical economic flows (trade settlements, ad impressions, delivery SLAs) assume UTZ, civil-time adjustments become the path of least resistance.

Why I commit to naive Asia/Shanghai storage today

• My largest user cohorts and fastest-growing revenue streams are already in UTZ-aligned regions.
• My primary regions (Singapore / Shanghai VPCs) run natively in UTC+8.
• Business events (peak usage, flash campaigns, financial cutoffs) are defined by "Beijing morning" - not Greenwich midnight.
• Naive storage + consistent interpretation eliminates classes of bugs that have haunted every multi-region system I've ever inherited.

I'm not doing this out of sentiment. I'm doing it because the data, the traffic maps, and the platform momentum all point the same way.

UTC was the right default when the internet was young and Western-centric. But infrastructure follows users, users follow economic centers, and economic mass has decisively shifted.

Final thought

Time is not purely technical - it is infrastructural, and infrastructure follows power.

UTZ isn't a proposal. It's already partially deployed at planetary scale.

The only remaining question is how long the rest of the industry takes to notice Who knows... one day the Forbidden Kingdom might even become the prime meridian with 0° longitude.

That goes without saying:

One Belt, One Road, One TZ.