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China move could call time on GMT

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Stephen Chenin Beijing

The hour has come. China has decided to call a truce with the United States in the fight for time.

Next month, a Chinese government delegation heads to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva to cast its vote and its influence in the 193-member organisation - on a US proposal to amend the global standard of timekeeping.

The US wants to get rid of time standards based on the earth's rotation, a somewhat erratic system that underpins Greenwich Mean Time and Co-ordinated Universal Time.

Instead, Washington wants the world to stick to International Atomic Time (TAI), which is based on around 400 atomic clocks ticking away in some 70 national institutes of measurement, observatories and other institutions located in 48 nations.

The change is supported by most developed countries - except the UK, the historical home of GMT - because of TAI's immediate technical benefits in an age of satellite navigation and air-traffic control systems. But it will need a big majority to gain acceptance at next month's meeting of the ITU, a specialist agency of the United Nations.

Beijing has long opposed changing the system, perceiving the US proposal as an attempt to thwart China's growing influence at the ITU, and one with serious economic consequences: upgrading software and devices alone would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

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