International-to-International connection at PVG with change of terminal

Question

I've booked a bit of an unusual ticket and am having a hard time untangling the logistics for this connection at Shanghai Pudong.

It's HKG (Hong Kong)-PVG (Shanghai Pudong) on Cathay Pacific, arriving at Terminal 2 at PVG. And then PVG-CJU (Jeju, South Korea) on China Eastern Airlines, departing Terminal 1 at PVG. All on a single ticket. While these airlines are in different alliances, they do interline and have a through check-in arrangement.

It's unclear to me how this international-to-international transfer works with the change in terminal, as previous questions didn't address that. My understanding from this past answer is that the immigration process for transfer passengers usually involves being admitted and then immediately departing. Does that work when I need to change terminals, or do I need to go through regular arrivals immigration in T2, go out and change terminals landside, and then go to T1 as a departing passenger?

I am a US Citizen and do not hold a Chinese visa (I'll be using the 144-hour visa-free transit facility). Connection time is 2.5 hours.

Answer 1

So I did this. It worked out, but I only arrived at the gate with about 5 minutes before it closed, and easily could have gone wrong.

The short version is that I was given no services as a transfer passenger. The staff at HKG were not able to issue me a boarding pass for the second leg (not even the China Eastern staff at their own counter), and their online checkin wouldn't work for me either. At PVG, I had to wait for immigration (there was no special process for the 144 hour visa-free transit; this was just handled at the regular immigration counter, though the guy gave me a different form to fill out before deciding it was taking too long and didn't matter), be processed into the country, walk across the long passageway to Terminal 1, wait at the check-in counter to get a boarding pass, go through exit immigration and security, ride a train to get to the satellite terminal, and walk to the gate. While I could have sped this up a little bit by trying to skip some queues, it took most all the time I had available. I wouldn't recommend it.

I didn't have checked luggage, so I don't know how that would have impacted this.