The cuts are probably to show the insides of the bar so they know it's solid gold all the way through. Who knows if they're handing out fakes though, imo it's very likely.

you can commonly find tungstein cored gold bars at sites like alibaba.com for far cheaper than real ones.

they are aparently pretty much indistinguishable from real bars without special equipment.

aparently even some major banks found some in their inventories

Possibly demonstrating ductility? Classier than chewing on the damn thing.

Are they handing out fakes as well?

This is china we are talking about. Of course they are.

Uncanny valley of yummy. It looks wrong but also like candy

Are they handing out fakes as well?

The Chinese are very good at this sort of thing.

I'm totally guessing here but I think it's to visually prove it's not some other metal wrapped in gold

This means that real estate developers are saying "I can't sell this house for $250K but I can sell it for $300K and give you a 1Kg ingot worth $50K" to get around the overvaluing of the house, because people won't buy the house at the prices Chinese government insists they should be sold.

Governments are preventing companies from rapidly dropping house prices. But because they’re not worth what they’re forced to keep charging by the government (government isn’t forcing anyone to buy for example), developers are needing to add extra value to the sale to get buyers, hence the gold bars.

House is worth $300k, but the government is forcing you to list it for $500k, so if I throw in $200k worth of gold bars, the whole sale is worth the price.

Gold price is like stocks, goues up and down. Check price / kg here https://goldprice.org/