Why does China, geographically the third largest country in the world, have only one time zone, while Australia, nearly as big, has six? Concentrating on the Chinese case, we argue that control over time zones represents an example of "symbolic centralization," the degree to which the central state concentrates intangible or symbolic resources that reinforce and assert state control, often invisibly, over people's everyday lives. Few state actions shape citizens' quotidian experience as fundamentally as symbolic action like setting the boundaries of time, yet political scientists have generally elided the implications of temporal authority. And those few scholars who discuss symbolic power in a systematic way have not considered how its degree of concentration varies cross-nationally. Symbolic centralization provides insights into how a distant political center may continue to shape fundamental aspects of daily life even while scoring low on resource-oriented quantitative measures of centralism. Using qualitative data and introducing a new quantitative "symbolic centralization" index, this article disaggregates the concept from the more commonly studied fiscal and political centralization through evidence from both conventional and anomalous cases.