Change the right time and catch up

After the American movie "Sleepless in Seattle" was released and became a sensation, the mayor of Seattle asked the city lights to stay on all night, and Seattle has since become a veritable city that never sleeps.

However, unlike what is portrayed in the artwork, Seattleites are used to going to bed early. This is also different from other American urbanites such as New Yorkers who are used to enjoying the nightlife. It is not difficult to observe that Seattleites go to bed early to get up early.

I have had several experiences in Seattle catching early morning flights. It was just five or six o'clock and the freeways were full of traffic, and the airport was crowded inside and outside. I once asked an American friend why Seattleites go to bed so early and get up so early, and the answer was: to catch up with the rhythm of life in the East - both in terms of traditionally formed habits and in terms of the needs of real economic life.

Seattleites who catch an early flight do so to get to the East during the day so they can work; those who don't do so are trying to get directly in touch with economic activity in the East, such as the New York Stock Exchange, which opens and closes on Eastern time, and politicians in Washington, D.C., who give speeches, release news and conduct debates on Eastern time. Historically, the center of politics, economics, and culture was first formed in the eastern part of the United States, to the point of an integrated nation where all activities are governed by time and rhythm there. In American parlance, this is called the catch-up, a phrase used as a verb in what is known in economic growth theory as "to catch up.

Seattle, Washington's most famous city, is located in the northwest corner of the United States, roughly the same location as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China. China is so vast that it spans five time zones from east to west, and Urumqi time is two hours behind Beijing time.

Unlike the United States, China has a unified time zone system based on Beijing time, abandoning consideration of the natural properties of time due to geographic location. Further differences arise: unlike the United States, where the continent is divided into different time zones but people have different schedules to catch up with the economic center in real life, people work and rest according to natural geographical time, although Chinese clocks are unified. Although China's clocks are uniform, people work and rest according to their natural geographic time. If we are not able to "catch up" in the rhythm of production and life, it is difficult for economic growth to "catch up" as well.

From knowing a time to measuring time, mastering time, forming time culture, from observing the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, to using sundials, and water clocks, until the invention of mechanical clocks, into the era of digital timekeeping, the history of the human relationship with time and its measurement methods is a history of scientific and technological progress. As time measurement became more and more precise, two new things emerged.

The first was authority, not only political authority but economic authority. The true meaning of a region as an economic center lies in its status as a time standard, and the integration of other regions with the economic center refers to the respect and adherence of those regions to that center's time. The second is productivity. As American economic historian David Landes points out, "The concept of labor productivity is a by-product of the clock." With the means to measure time precisely, time becomes a most scarce resource and it becomes necessary to measure productivity in terms of time.

It is well documented that the origin of time that people agree on is the unification of train schedules. Even at the height of the Industrial Revolution, each part of England still used its own time, so the first horse-drawn carriage service with a timetable, which appeared in 1784, could only indicate the departure time but not the arrival time. It was not until 1847 that companies engaged in the train-carrying business came together to produce a train timetable based on Greenwich Mean Time. Subsequently, with various industries following suit, the British Parliament passed legislation in 1880 to make Greenwich Mean Time the legal standard time, fundamentally changing the natural economy's mode of production and way of life and conforming to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production.

Different concepts and ideas of time represent different cultures and the stage of economic development to which such cultures belong.

More than 5000 years ago, the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians learned to measure time. But clocks in the real sense (mechanical clocks) were invented in the 13th century by the Mediterranean countries. In terms of mechanical technology, the Western countries monopolized the manufacture of mechanical clocks for as long as 300 years; and in terms of accuracy, these countries dominated for a much longer time. At the same time, the Western countries have long been the center of the world economy, so much so that any country trying to catch up, needs to "watch" - to learn from the pioneers of science, technology, production methods, ideas, and culture. Some countries and regions even copied their ideologies, legal systems, etc. Many nations that have fallen behind in modern times have learned the lesson of refusing to "match the watch".

For example, in imperial China, the imperial court regarded the clocks imported from the West as a curiosity and treated them as mere playthings, without any intention to learn their manufacturing technology. We missed the opportunity to "match" or catch up with our glorious civilization of thousands of years, and instead lagged far behind the Western nations.

The economic historian Maddison estimates that China maintained a higher GDP growth rate than Europe throughout the 18th century, and then declined until the founding of the People's Republic of China when GDP growth was negative.

A comparative study entitled "pace of life" was conducted in 31 countries, using "the speed of walking on a city sidewalk," "the speed of a postal worker selling an ordinary stamp," and "the speed of a clock in a public place. " and "the accuracy of clocks in public places. The study was finally published under the title "Geographical Distribution of Time". The five countries with the fastest pace of life were Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Japan, and Italy, while the five countries considered to have the slowest pace of life were Syria, El Salvador, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico. The United States ranked 16th, right in the middle of the pack. While observing in Trinidad and Tobago, anthropologists found that if a party was planned to start at 6 p.m., people would not show up until 6:45 or even 7 p.m. and were not proud to say, "Any time is Trinidad and Tobago time."

Refusing to "match the clock" means stubbornly maintaining one's backward time values, which, according to economic growth theory, means refusing to change one's economic homeostasis. The consequence of this is the failure to develop and accumulate the conditions necessary for catching up. These conditions include the level of science and technology, human capital, reproductive attitudes, the market system, and the investment environment.

Since the late 1970s, China's reform and opening up have meant facing the reality, acknowledging its economic and technological backwardness, and "aligning" itself with the developed world. At the beginning of the new century, China's accession to the WTO has further regulated its schedule within the framework of international law, using a more accurate time frame as a reference point. The same is true for strategies such as the development of the western region, which needs to catch up with the developed regions in terms of technology, institutions, market development, and even the pace of life.

Boeing, a major corporation at least on par with Microsoft, once had its headquarters in Seattle. However, despite repeated efforts by the mayor of Seattle, the governor of Washington State, and the local people to stay, Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago. The company's president explained that it was inconvenient to locate such an international mega-corporation in a corner of the world. It would take six hours just to fly from here to the capital city of Washington, D.C. As the leader of such a huge company, he makes such flights many times a year, spending as much as 10 hours each time with the time difference.

Whether it's the departing or the remaining Seattleites, whether it's a celebrity like Bill Gates or an ordinary citizen, what their haste tells us is that it's impossible to catch up without being "on the clock".