>3. It's much harder to enforce these in China (unless you have the right connections, in which case you probably don't need to go through normal courts any way

>3. It's much harder to enforce these in China (unless you have the right connections, in which case you probably don't need to go through normal courts any way). This is a bit of an interesting question actually. Because in reality these IOU's aren't much different from a loan. And failure to pay a loan is punished pretty severely by china's Social credit system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System . So in theory it perhaps shouldn't be too hard to punish people for this, but then again I don't really know too much about the chinese financial system.