I've always eaten it cooked by friends but today at Walmart, I've bought the pre-packed ones that are thinly sliced, like prosciuto. I wanted to have it as a snack with some goat cheese and wondered if it's okay to eat it raw, right out of the pack?

It's highly salted, but when asked I a small shop vendor if they needed to be cooked, the answer was yes. The shop had them out in open. I have asked someone at Walmart and C4 about prepacked Yunnan ham, and again the answer was yes it needs to be cooked. Though this was for the larger square hunks of ham.

Difficult to say, I have eaten it raw, as it is well cured. But I would not want to be responsible for any health issues other than my own.
The advice locals give is, always cook everything to death. The Yunnan ham is nowhere near as salty as the Shanghai bacon, thankfully.
If you want proscuito, you can get this in Metro.

Are you specifically referring to xuanwei ham? Wonderful stuff.

No problem eating it raw. It is however very salty and thus can not be compared with Italian proscuito. Drink plenty of water or beer with it (Nice snack with beer). Keep the salt issue in mind because you easily overdose yourself with it.
Cooking helps to leach some of the salt out and therefore this is recommended. Best is to cook thin slices in plenty of water and throw away the water because it will contain lots of salt. When preparing dishes with it don't add any salt or soya sauce.

It's definitely not proscuitto. I get a bit unnerved from the absence of the strong smoke tastes that you get with Western, wood cured pork products. I know that wood smoking actually kills certain microbes.

Ham and bacon are two things I really miss from home. I've tried all sorts of local cured pork, in an effort to find replacements for my traditional Smithfield and Oscar Meyer treats. So far, I've found nothing even close in flavor. But, in general I've found that frying it in oil until its really, really crisp and giving it a generous sprinkle of black pepper makes it a passable substitute. (I wish I had a bottle of LiquidSmoke!)

Chinese cured pork is visually gorgeous, but its definitely made for a different palate. I'm incredibly curious to see what comes of the recent purchase of Smithfield (the #1 U.S. pork producer) by Shaunghui (the #1 Chinese pork producer). They definitely aren't buying it to capture the U.S. market, since pork consumption in America is plummeting. I'm hoping that I'll start seeing some (hopefully reasonably priced) American bacon and ham in local stores next year.

Thanks all.

NB The smoke taste in most (not all) western products is in the cure (liquid smoke) and that is why the taste can be so strong. Unless it says naturally smoked on the package, it probably isn't.

The bacon we get from Guizhou is smoked, and we buy it in the market where they cut it off of the whole ham (pigs hind leg). Maybe that kind of bacon can be bought in Kunming too.

Thanks tigertiger. I'd begun to accept this as one of those things that is just inherently different in China. I'll keep an eye out for the Guizhou stuff. (Though, I admit I'm a bit cowardly, when it comes to eating anything that resembles its living counterpart.) :)

Yes it can be eaten as-is. It is cured.