@Tony, I've run into a lot of a$$holishness of the type mmkunming describes here, though not always so baldly as in the examples of it that he gives; and I'm interested in seeing how he and others might deal with my attempt to redefine the situation, which I think might make it easier to see - arrogance is easier to see than large global theories about cultural colonialism, and I wish more foreigners in Kunming were able to see it for what it is.

If KIA is far out of town, has it moved? It used to be in the city. Wicker Basket south is not far out either - great bakery, at least for bread, & a good US-style salad bar. The foreigners who congregate there tend to be Protestant Christians of the non-drinking variety, largely or mostly from the US, but they do not beat you with Bibles etc.
Your budget for a decent 2-bedroom should be fine, although I'm not going to get into an discussion of what 'decent' might mean.

@I sometimes kinda like the fries, though I'm not defending them against any principles at all. And if you're ever in Hong Kong, at least some of the McDonald's there have pancakes for breakfast, which are not too bad if you haven't had any for awhile, though I'm not comparing them to anything except their general absence in Kunming - or is this possible here? I've only been to McDonalds about 3-4 times here. I noticed the other night that O'Reilly's has pancakes, I'd be surprised if they're not a better bet.

@faraday: don't be ridiculous, nobody lives outside of culture, not if they're human. Anyway, the link didn't claim this, and anyway there is the question of who defines what is appropriate/inappropriate education - "Who will educate the educators?" - K. Marx. One might add: "and for whose benefit?" The article is all about company culture, and company cultures are influenced or & above by the goals of those who run them, and those goals are always about their gaining & increasing control of wealth/power. The idea of education is never a neutral one, or in some strict conformity to some objective reality - 'education' itself is part of culture.

@mmkunming: important to start by understanding, but culture, like human bodies, is only alive because it is always changing. This doesn't make the changes either good or bad, but it does make them complicated for relative 'outsiders' to understand. cultures are 'preserved' in museums - this can teach us things about the present (e.g., where it came from, how & why) - but of course somebody has to decide what should be in the museum and what should not, and how it is to be understood (and fortunately people are often smart enough to out-think the official bs, whatever it may be). I will agree with you that one needs to start without a lot of previous assumptions and learn something before one does or doesn't conform to it (and, during this process, to realize and reconsider the assumptions one has, perhaps without knowing it), but at the end of the day one doesn't have to practice footbinding - I'm rather glad that the Chinese population, as well as those who lead/control them, came to a cultural understanding that this was to come to an end. Plenty of foreign Christian missionaries (who I am certainly not praising for everything, and who were usually culturally arrogant one way or another) encouraged them to abandon footbinding, but I don't think that it was dropped as a result of cultural colonialism, or that, at least in this aspect at least, the Christian missionaries were 100% 'wrong'.
As to smiles, I see plenty of them, they are part of communication, but like everything else, one must understand the particular cultural 'language' of behavior to know what it may or may not mean. Takes awhile, like for the rest of your life, even at 'home'.