Originally Posted by
jiejie
It's not a China thing, it's a PVG thing, that makes international transit passengers collect luggage and manually go through all these hoops to get it checked in again. At PEK and CAN which are the other two big hubs (for CA and CZ respectively), international transit luggage is autotransferred through to the onward international destination.
Even for terminal transfers? (I honestly don't know because I've never connected at PEK, and have only done domestic to international and vv at CAN.) Regardless of that, being forced landside during transit at PVG isn't a huge deal as long as you don't have to switch terminals (even this isn't the end of the world, but the walk is a solid ten minutes).