[LEAPSECS] "China move could call time on GMT"

[Dennis Ferguson]

This morning's South China Morning Post has an article about China
dropping opposition to the change to UTC.  The headline is here

    http://www.scmp.com

but the body is behind a paywall.

Here are the quotes from Liu Changhong, who works for China's
equivalent of NIST and who is apparently the official spokesman
on the issue now:

   "A few years ago we could not understand some technical
   complaints from the US and took them as a plot against
   China because we had not encountered those problems,"
   Liu said.  "Now we do.  Our delegation will attend the
   meeting with an open mind.  If most countries want the
   change, we will vote for it."

And, concerning Beidou:

   China has found itself in a similar situation since the
   deployment of its Beidou navigation system, Liu said.

   "The leap-second operation has made ground devices more
   difficult to maintain," Liu said.  "Dropping the leap
   second would give everyone a break, especially our
   consumers.  We sweat each time a leap second operation
   is called, for fear that the equipment might go wrong."

It seems like the difference between opposition and support
might be the ownership of a satellite navigation system (which
uses Yet Another Not-UTC Timescale for its system time).

Dennis Ferguson