Originally Posted by
cooljw
In my experience large baggage *always* goes through the xray when taking the land border crossings from HK into China. But flying into Pudong or BJ airports - never once have I been asked to xray my bags.
One x-ray in Shanghai, I don't recall if it was PuDong or not.
There were special circumstances involved, though--in the eyes of the customs official I was wheeling out more luggage than normal which caught his eye. Then the fact that my entry stamp was two days earlier drew more attention.
At that point my wife caught up (I had finally started walking to get her to quit talking to the baggage people forever) and explained that the airline left our bags behind, we were just picking them up now. (She's a native speaker, I speak a couple of dozen words with a bad enough accent that people likely won't understand me so I left the explanation to her.) End of inspection.
Usually they don't look no matter what. There's a nuke alarm there, my wife tripped it and nobody responded. After waiting a bit to see if anyone was going to give us directions we finally went on out. (While there was a second detector that actually was manned it's before the formalities and thus doesn't scan your checked baggage. Even there they didn't do the elementary test of separating her from her carry-ons and sweeping a geiger counter over her to see if the source was dispersed {leftover from medical imaging} or a point source. They simply accepted her word that it was from a heart scan despite having left the card from the lab behind.)