Why Korea is changing is time Zone?

  IT SEEMS appropriate for a nation that venerates its history and is stuck in the past: on August 15th everyone in North Korea will go back in time, as they turn back their clocks by half an hour. The hermit kingdom already has its own calendar, with years counted from 1912, the birth year of its founder and “eternal president”, Kim Il Sung. This week’s change means it will have its own time zone, too. Why is North Korea turning back its clocks?
Such time-travelling is the latest example of a long historical tradition of rulers expressing political power by adjusting clocks and calendars. Doing so alters a fundamental aspect of daily life, literally at a stroke. And what better illustration could there be of a ruler’s might than control over time itself? Admittedly, not all such changes stand the test of time: French revolutionaries, keen to emphasise the break with their monarchist past, failed to get their ten-hour clock and entirely new calendar to stick after imposing them in 1793. The Soviet Union’s experiments with five- and six-day weeks during the 1930s also failed to endure. But those changes that do persist can memorialise past rulers more effectively than any physical monument. July was named in honour of Julius Caesar in 45BC, and August was later renamed after Augustus Caesar. They and their empire are long gone, but these two eminent Romans live on in the Western calendar.

In the modern era, control of time provides a way to underline the clout of central government: both India and China, despite their size, have a single time zone, which keeps everyone marching in step with the capital. It also offers an opportunity for emphasising independence and non-conformity. Hugo Chávez turned the clocks back by half an hour in 2007 to move Venezuela into its own time zone—supposedly to allow a “fairer distribution of the sunrise” but also ensuring that the socialist republic did not have to share a time zone with the United States. Perhaps the strangest example is that of Turkmenistan under President Saparmurat Niyazov, who renamed all the months and most of the days of the week in 2002, even renaming April after his mother. For its part, North Korea is shifting its time zone this week to reverse the imposition of Tokyo time by “wicked Japanese imperialists” in 1912. South Korea did the same in 1954, but switched back to Japanese time in 1961. North Korea’s new time zone therefore extends the division of the Korean peninsula into the realm of time as well as space.
In theory, modern technology offers liberation from temporal tyranny, by allowing people to use whichever system they prefer. Smartphones and computers can seamlessly translate between time zones and calendar systems, allowing people to use whichever they like. In practice, however, time zones and calendars are more than just arbitrary ways to rule lines on time. They do not merely specify how to refer to a particular instant or period; they also dictate and co-ordinate activities across entire societies, in particular by defining which days are working days and national holidays. These have to be consistent within countries and, in some cases, between them: just ask Saudi Arabia, which in 2013 moved its weekend from Thursday/Friday to Friday/Saturday, to bring it into line with other Arab states. The need for such co-ordination means there is no escape from centralised control of clocks and calendars—which explains, in turn, why the tendency to tinker with them for political purposes is timeless.culled from economist Magazine