Weird timezone issue with pytz

>>> import pytz
>>> pytz.timezone('Asia/Hong_Kong')
<DstTzInfo 'Asia/Hong_Kong' LMT+7:37:00 STD>

A seven hour and 37 minute offset? This is a little strange, does anyone experience the same issue?

In fact I'm getting different behavior between

import pytz
from datetime import datetime
hk = pytz.timezone('Asia/Hong_Kong')

dt1 = datetime(2012,1,1,tzinfo=hk)
dt2 = hk.localize(datetime(2012,1,1))
if dt1 > dt2:
   print "Why?"

Solution 1:

Time zones and offsets change over the years. The default zone name and offset delivered when pytz creates a timezone object are the earliest ones available for that zone, and sometimes they can seem kind of strange. When you use localize to attach the zone to a date, the proper zone name and offset are substituted. Simply using the datetime constructor to attach the zone to the date doesn't allow it to adjust properly.

Solution 2:

While I'm sure historic changes in timezones are a factor, passing pytz timezone object to the DateTime constructor results in odd behavior even for timezones that have experienced no changes since their inception.

import datetime
import pytz 

dt = datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 15, 0, 0, tzinfo= pytz.timezone('US/Eastern'))

produces

2020-07-15 00:00:00-04:56

Creating the datetime object then localizing it produced expected results

import datetime
import pytz 

dt = datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 15, 0, 0)
dt_local = timezone('US/Eastern').localize(dt)

produces

2020-07-15 00:00:00-04:00