Vearn, getting a certificate to say you are not married is not the problem. Of course the embassy/consulate can give you that.

Getting something saying you have no children is impossible as China is possibly the only country in the world which monitors this so rigorously.

We went through the same thing. The British Consulate said they could not do it. They could, however, witness my affidavit saying I have no children - not the same thing at all and not sufficient for the kunming authorities.

Hi Queensway, We've been through much the same thing and it still isn't resolved and probably never will be. Basically for the last year we've been doing as Dave79 suggested but it became a pain to do as we'd moved to Beijing. Of course we could do it from Beijing (infact that's preferable as they entry and exit as opposed to just exit permit in Kunming) but all documents would have to be sent to Kunming PSB by the Beijing PSB as that is where my wife's hukou is and then back to Beijing PSB- lots of opportunities for important documents to go missing!
Its true that they will not renew a chinese visa in a british passport inside China if the baby was born in China and has a chinese parent. However the Chinese embassy in London will issue 12 month multiple entry tourist visas -we got one of these on a trip to UK at Christmas. It cost 200 pounds (my china residence permit only costs 40 RMB) but at least it means we don't need to worry about this for a year and we can enter and exit China at will. The problem with getting the exit permit is that it does take a week (in Kunming) or supposedly 3 weeks if documents are being sent between cities. If for any reason we need to leave China tomorrow I could do it, my wife could do it (she has 2 year UK visa), but our daughter previously couldn't. So getting a long term visa is far preferable to the whole exit permit thing. However it can only be done in the country of citizenship, so we had to do it in the UK.

If you have a dual currency credit card with a visa or mastercard logo as well as a unionpay logo then you can use it anywhere. If its just a debit card then it only works on Unionpay so will only work where there is an ATM that supports Unionpay.

Outside mainland China, pretty much every ATM in Hong Kong and Macau will take Unionpay but further a field than that you are lucky to find one. I'm not saying there aren't any but I would definitely not rely on it. And you may find RMB cash isn't good enough either. You probably need to buy some US Dollars before travelling, then you can change these to local currency once you arrive.

I wonder if the driver perhaps saw your hand. Unfortunately drivers believe its bad luck if someone bleeds in their car. Absurd - yes, immoral — absolutely, but sadly reality.

I remember when my wife was pregnant she thought it a real likelihood that we wouldn't be able to get a cab to the hospital in an emergency.

Sadly this is not limited to Kunming but exists in the big cities too. A few weeks ago we had to take an ambulance to a hospital in Beijing because taxi drivers refused to take a sick child.

if you're able to get a chinese version then you don't need the english version.

The Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7 allow you to download language packs. I'm running Win 7 Ultimate Chinese with English language pack for my login and its identical to the English version except for the bootup and initial user login screen which is in chinese.