"Imagine that you are cornered at a party when the topic of race comes up. Your interlocutor tells you that, in the English language, “race” can refer to both a competition wherein one tries to outrun the others and a visually identifiable group of people sharing common ancestry. It is no wonder that racism has been such an intractable issue in the Anglosphere; the very word embodies a sense of competition among different peoples.

You quickly spot a friend on the other side of the room because you understand using a literal reading of a vocabulary item to explain the origins, evolution, and persistence of racism in the Anglosphere is completely ridiculous.

For Chinese speakers, however, this is a frustratingly common experience. The sheer novelty and exoticism of a character-based Eastern language to most English readers mean these spurious dissections of Chinese words can easily be passed off as impressive sociolinguistic insight."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/06/chinese-characters-phrenology-orientalism/

The answer is quite simple.
Most so called China analyst know little about China.
And they are to eager to impress the even more uninformed public. Unfortunately, this group include well known analyst like David Shambaugh.

"Another common example is for “safety” or “security,” 安全. The word is composed of the characters for “peace” and “total, complete.” David Shambaugh in his book China Goes Global: The Partial Power translates the term as “complete tranquility,” which helps us understand why China apparently views security “in more comprehensive terms” than others. The very concept and word rendered in Chinese, he writes, say “more about China’s internal order than external threats to security,” somehow. The word, pronounced anquan in Standard Mandarin, also exists in both Japanese, read as anzen, and Korean, anjeon, but Shambaugh doesn’t extend the anecdote outside Chinese borders."

David Shambaugh's book "China Goes Global: The Partial Power" in which he belittled China's tech company like Huawei was outdated almost at the moment it was published.

He "snake feet" interpretation is misleading. He translating “同志，你们 辛苦了 ” into "Comrades, you are suffering" was outrageous. With this kind of analysts on the US side, the US disadvantaged in its competition with China.