The swine flu checks/delays are hopefully not going to go on indefinitely. On the more general point, in China, the concept of international transit has not been around that long. When coupled with the fact that the "people-flow" through Chinese airports is never designed from a passenger-friendly point of view, those who try int'l transit through Chinese airports are going to be serving as guinea pigs for a while longer. At least the newer, larger airports are physically designed to be able to deal with this pretty easily, it's just that the Chinese operational setup is lacking and lagging.

However, if you are from the US, it's hardly fair to complain about the Chinese system when not a single US international airport is able to deal with this common and long-occurring transit condition in any better fashion, and usually handle it much worse with an extra helping of bad attitude.