Native Mandarin speaker here - please take this article with a grain of salt as it reeks of whitesplaining.
I know the writer spent a bunch of time in China but a bunch of the "nuance" of how the names are interpreted seem either excessive or overinterpretive.
Just-another-opinion: As a Chinese person I actually prefer direct translations such as 川普 (Trump) as the name is usually pretty distinct, and people who share the same surname can have different characters to represent them.
Off-handedly, the characters used to translate a person's name often times can convey additional info - I can't think of too many specifics by country, but it's very easy to tell who's from Japan because they just take the kanji and use the Chinese translation (which butchers the pronunciation), or Korean because certain characters are almost always used for translating certain surnames (such as 金 -> Kim).
I know the writer spent a bunch of time in China but a bunch of the "nuance" of how the names are interpreted seem either excessive or overinterpretive.
Just-another-opinion: As a Chinese person I actually prefer direct translations such as 川普 (Trump) as the name is usually pretty distinct, and people who share the same surname can have different characters to represent them.
Off-handedly, the characters used to translate a person's name often times can convey additional info - I can't think of too many specifics by country, but it's very easy to tell who's from Japan because they just take the kanji and use the Chinese translation (which butchers the pronunciation), or Korean because certain characters are almost always used for translating certain surnames (such as 金 -> Kim).