If you opened this post in excited anticipation of a Radio gokunming or similar, sadly, to the best of my knowledge, no such radio station exists. But why not? Surely such a station is overdue. One providing a magazine type mix of news, public service announcements, music, book clubs, sponsored language programmes for Chinese, English and possibly other languages. Cooking programmes, travel, health advice and lots more. Certainly not a pure expat service: I imagine a virtual sound-based meeting place in the same way that restaurants like Salvadors provide food and drink in a mixed culture setting.
Could such a station be financially viable either online or broadcast? Are there any policy or legal barriers to such a station? Do any cities or regions in China have such a facility already?

The technicals - such as RF spectrum are controlled by MIIT. Content has always been controlled by SARFT.

Names may have been changed due to the recent extension of Xi's administration.

Radio is more a feature of taxis - most things these days are streaming, which comes with considerably less overhead. Tall buildings tend to attenuate radio signals and china seems to encourage very low power radio stations - as you may have noticed.

You're proposing what would probably be called "silo" content - must most content these days is highly distributed and tends to be video focused - with direct to publisher sponsorship - so if you elected to do the "silo" approach to content - then you'd be known as a "portal" like yahoo or even gokm (gokm publishes news articles with links to the original publishers).

Streaming video is currently still a gray zone, but all internet content should technically be controlled by SARFT...but at the moment is somewhat unregulated until publishers become "public nuisances".

@michael2015 Certainly not envisaging video, which I personally see as a distraction. What you describe may be an option but nothing at all like I imagine, which is more an Internet based radio you can listen to at home or on the go. A relatively tiny city like Chiangmai has at least one fully compliant station that I know of and Kunming region is ripe for a RADIO like this. Also, regulation is not necessarily a barrier.

Technically, it's entirely feasible - but the sustainable business case is the issue. Radio depends on advertising, which would be predominantly chinese. If you could do the business case, you can probably find investors to get it going...basically this is "talk radio".

I personally like your idea - I used to listen to old 50's detective stories on long late nite commutes. But cash is king...

Yunnan does have some frequently appearing foreign faces in local

(and even national) media (TV at least), but these are mostly serving Chinese audience.

Turning that around to serve foreigners in Yunnan, or further in China or even abroad could be a selling point for Yunnan tourism.

I know that at least in Shanghai there is something like this.

How this could probably work, is that foreign expats (or others interested) in Kunming created content to foreign audience, that would then be sold/given to already operating Kunming or Yunnan media companies.

Maybe it could be a weekly scheduled programming or something.

For Chinese audience, such English speaking programming could function as language practise about local issues that they are (maybe) already familiar.

Since it would be only about creating content, you wouldn't have to worry about broadcasting regulations so much.

Thinking about the business case.

Your audience - How many expats are there in Kunming, and what percentage would be regular listeners? You might be able to find out how many expats their are in Kunming from official figures. You could also guesstimate the percentage who would listen by posting a poll on here to count how many people would be interested in such a service (divide positive responses by 3), then finding out how many registered users on Gokunming and work out your percentage. This final number would be a guesstimate of your total audience (some regular, some less so).
Your revenue streams - somewhat dependent on your audience size.
Your outgoings - how much time, money are other resources can you commit.
Cost-benefit analysis - net positive or net negative.

If you are not thinking about making any money out of this, and it is just a pet project, then you need to minimize your investment (time, energy, money). Consider podcasts or blogs (going out of fashion) or vlogs (which you don't want to do).

The forum members who provide advice in this post speak about money. This may be rightly so, in view of a radio business, but how about those free radios which were born in the 60s all around the world with very little if not even any advertising? They were simply born by the passion of music lovers to share contemporary music of high caliber.
We live in our biased perspective of making business at all cost, also because we live in China. Yet the world still turns around independent of money per se.
Gokunming is a pro-profit small organisation, but the Forum section is a major part of it, in which the very same michael, tiger, nnoble and janjal and other have posted invaluable information for free.
Don't call me naive if I suggest to forget about FM and money, and start an internet radio about Kunming at first and for free.
Once it takes off, we can speak in financial terms about it.

@ricsnap: You may not have to "make" money, but obviously you're going to need some startup money and some operating expense money, as well as money to live on.