But yes, I just traveled from Shanghai back to my home in the US. The queues in China were much, much shorter than those in the American airports. PVG posted a "25 minutes or less" target for all travellers to get through security and immigration. And they hit it, even at peak travel times with huge volumes of people. At American airports if you arrive less than an hour before boarding they might not allow you in until you rebook on a later flight.

You could see it in the architecture of their systems: The American facilities have huge snaking queues designed for as much capacity as possible, which lead to obvious bottlenecks. And when you arrive at the front of the line, a gruff immigration officer in tactical gear doesn't look at the line except to say "No line jumping!" while they're taking 10 minutes on one individual. In China, there's just not enough distance in the line to allow a long delay to form, there's no single point bottlenecks to slow down the system, and helpful people direct you to the shortest lines.