@CHUD - I am very sorry to read your post here about your problems with TWOV at Beijing. For the immigration issue it certainly does seem that you received unusually hard treatment, and sad to say it is quite possible that this was because someone didn't like your, or your wife's, passport.

You also received some bad advice here regarding the overstay of the TWOV stamp in your passport. As a general point it is worth noting for anyone else that comes across this thread, that if you think you will overstay your permit/visa in China, the golden rule is report to a police station, or better still a PSB office *before* the overstay. In your case, given that you were entitled to the 72 hour TWOV allowance, I am fairly confident this could have been resolved before reaching the airport, or at least you could have been given some paperwork that would have made things smoother at the airport.

Regarding the underlying transfer between flights, it does seem that this kind of thing falls between the cracks in the system. You arrived on time, but didn't make it to the front of the queue at the transfer desk in time for the check-in cut-off. In this case though I really would expect AA to have stepped up and sorted flights for you.

From what you say you made every effort to head to the transfer counter as quickly as possible (delayed by the bus gate arrival and slow deplaning), supported by the fact that there were other people in the same situation as you (though it is not clear from your first post if they were also transferring to the same AA flight). The fact that they did not offer to rebook you for free on another flight even departing a day later is a total fail in my book for AA, so I think you should indeed start with them in trying to reclaim some of your losses.

However, just to complicate things, I am not 100% sure that your ticket was in fact MCT-compliant ... I am not fully confident about how to interpret the "exceptions" in the MCT output below, but my reading of the text is that although the default MCT for international-international connections at T3 is 60 minutes (which, as others have said is something of a joke), for any connection at T3 to an AA flight the MCT is given as 120 minutes. I am not sure also though how binding this information is also compared to the standard MCT numbers.

If so, and if Expedia sold you a ticket that does not conform to this, then maybe that could be another avenue to pursue to recover some of the costs, though personally I think I would start with AA, not least as Expedia seem to have been helpful so far. If AA also decide that the ticket was not MCT-compliant (based on the exception above) then talking with Expedia could be the next step.

KVS Tool 7.9.8 - Reference: Minimum Connection Time [MCT]: PEK/CA-AA]