Originally Posted by
nologic
Well, HKG was trated as a separate country and after going thru the first customs queue, I was escorted to a separate desk, which the office spent about a minute looking something up and then stamped my passport with a Stay Permit, good thru the day of my departing flight (which was the next day). The hotel had never heard of this, so it took them a bit to find the visa, but they eventually did and were fine. AA in Boston check in was also aware of the rule and had not problem, although it took a while for the AAgent to type everything into my record, which almost caused my bag to miss the check-in cutoff, but everything turned out to be fine.
You seem to be missing my point. The point is not that Hong Kong is a separate country, the point is that to take advantage of Chinese Transit without Visa, you must be using the Chinese airport between two different international airports. So if your previous travel was HKG-China-Intl (not HKG) or vice-versa, that is OK and you were properly allowed through.
But that is not the journey you tried to hypothesize in a previous post, where you said:
...Are you saying that I can go thru customs in Shanghai and just show the Immigration Officer a print out of an e-ticket within 24 hours from PVG-HKG, and then I can leave the airport, go into Shanghai, spend two days, and return within 48 hours....
This comment implied a HKG-PVG-HKG journey which is NOT legal within the TWOV rules. There is no lack of clarity in the regulation on this point. People who have tried this and made it as far as the mainland airport are usually refused entry and put back on a plane to where they came from. FT certainly has stories from people who made this assumption and got it wrong. "Transit" does not equal "Round Trip."