I've just written to a relative who will be visiting soon with advice about planning her trip. I thought I'd share my thoughts with all of you.
Our experience has been that with very few exceptions two days has been as much time as we really wanted in any city we've visited. To be fair, we've now traveled to a lot of places and the eight-hundredth Buddhist temple is somehow quite a lot less exciting than the first, so on our first visit we might have found ourselves entertained for longer in a single city. Chinese cities tend to consist of vast expanses of totally lack-luster modern high-rises. As a general rule of thumb, most cities will have enough to keep you busy in town for a day (typically a museum, a park, a couple of temples/monuments and a street market/pedestrian zone) and about a day's worth of "in the surrounding area" activities which are most easily seen by hiring a car and driver for the day. The guidebooks will tend to list rather more sites, but we havefound that if the books lists 3 parks that all sound fantastic we tend to enjoy the first, get bored after a very short visit to the second and, if we make it to the third at all, we leave without going in. The same applies to any other category of site. It is not that any of the sites is necessarily uninteresting, but only that they tend to be enough alike that one in a day or two is plenty.
As you make your plans, keep in mind that China is BIG and that train travel here bears little resemblance to train travel in Europe. Trains tend to be crowded, noisy, and slow. Don't get me wrong, it is kind of fun to take the train (and I hate trains in general), but you might not want to take trains everywhere, especially not for very long-distance trips (Hong Kong to Beijing, for example would probably not be a pleasant trip by train). We have very few high-speed trains here, so it can often take 10+ hours to travel between cities which are less than an hour apart by air. Unlike in Europe where train stations tend to be located conveniently close to where you're likely to be going as a tourist, that is not the case in China and train stations may be just as far from your final destination as the airport is.
Of the three travel approaches (a reasonably long time in a few carefully selected cities, barnstorming, or base-camp + day-trips), I would advise something between the first two (with the caveat that the best sites in some cities are actually sort of outside the city and require a day-trip, e.g. Great Wall in Beijing, Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an).
If I were putting together a "highlights of China" itinerary for 2 weeks (or maybe a little more) I think it would look something like this:
Hong Kong: 3 full days (you could easily spend more, but 3 days is probably enough to avoid feeling like you really missed out)
Xi'an: 1.5-2 days
Beijing: 4-5 days
Shanghai: 4 days
Hangzhou: 1.5-2 days
Suzhou: 1 day
Nanjing: 2-3 days
I haven't yet been to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou or Nanjing, so these estimates might change. They are close enough together that you can probably reasonably transfer among them by train. Suzhou can also be done as a day trip from Shanghai (at least Ben is planning to do that in a couple of weeks).
To me, this selection captures most of the highlights of China (with the notable exception of the Yangtze River & 3 Gorges Damn...something to come back for). Hong Kong is its own, unique city. Xi'an has the Terracotta Warriors (one of my very favorite sites in China) and will give you a taste of Muslim-Chinese culture. Beijing has the Great Wall, Forbidden City, etc. and is the heart of northern Chinese food & culture. Shanghai, etc. will give you a sense of southern China. Hangzhou and Suzhou are supposed to be the two most beautiful cities in China and Nanjing, of course, has the WWII history.
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