Filipino citizen

If Shanghai is your only landing within mainland China, you and your wife are perfectly eligible for 24 hour visa free transit and your flight combination with separate tickets is also fine. In other words, both of you don't need any kind of visa.

Thank you!

Then you get this kind of answer from Chinese embassy in Manila,
"You'd better get a visa if you want go out of the airport."

Don't they have a clue about the visa free transit?

/Klas

Well, perhaps it's you that doesn't quite understand. Transit without visa is entirely separate from being permitted to leave the airport. It simply means (obviously) that you don't need a visa to TRANSIT China. But to ENTER China you must be granted a temporary entry permit, which is at the discretion of immigration. They are two completely separate processes. Very often people confuse these two, and then complain that they have to stay in the airport for the duration of their connection. They have been allowed to transit, but not to enter, and they WOULD need a visa to be sure to exit the airport. In your case, however, because you need to collect your luggage and check-in again, you will almost certainly be granted the temporary entry permit. As you can see, transit without visa has several details and nuances, so perhaps you shouldn't be so quick to be harsh on the embassy.

I'm not being harsh on embassy, you have to understand that if you plan a trip with a 10 hour layover you want some kind of conformation things will work out once you get there, I've been clear all time when I asked embassy what we want.

Actually, the embassies are never the best source of information because they are engaged mostly about the visas and visa free transit is actually not quite their turf because this segment is almost entirely under the jurisdiction of Chinese immigration and they don't belong to the same ministry.

I will repeat you... In case that you have separate tickets and I think you do because you will have to collect your luggage and make a new check-in, the immigration authorities simply have to grant you an entry permit because you would not be able to perform this operation otherwise.