Yes, I’d agree that in general the clean and widely accepted thing to do would just be to transliterate the names using the usual set of naming characters. Chin

Yes, I’d agree that in general the clean and widely accepted thing to do would just be to transliterate the names using the usual set of naming characters. Chinese people really do not care about the semantics of foreign names, just as Westerners will usually ignore the connotations of foreign names (unless especially weird, e.g. “Long Wang”). However, in the communities where these politicians are campaigning, there’s a really sizable number of Chinese voters, and I think the thinking is that a more native Chinese name will be more memorable for people. Foreign names are often less memorable than native ones, and if someone doesn’t define their Chinese name at all, multiple transliterations can arise which affects searchability. After all, as a politician, your name is a big part of your brand. If you accept that premise, then spending time to choose an appropriate name is an important step - after all, semantics do matter to some extent for native names in any language. Perhaps not to the extent shown in this article, but (for example) you would not want to accidentally choose a name that misgenders you or (worse) offends your voters.