Why isn't "Xi Jinping" spelled phonetically, as "She Jinping"?

[Igel]

6. Think of it as "sharp" versus "flat",

to use a 90-year-old descriptor.

Say "shhhh" in English. It's not Mandarin, it's in between.

Say "she" and "show." In my pronunciation, those two "sh" have a different pitch center. One sounds higher, one sounds lower. A third or so (maybe minor, maybe major).

Now move your tongue so that the hissing sound has an lower pitch, but not too much lower than "shoe" and in my warped speech "shoe" isn't bad for its "sh". In any event, not as low as possible--that pushes towards a weird retroflex "h" sound I don't even know how to search UPSID for. But it's distinctly lower than English "show".

That's Putonghua/Mandarin sh.

Go back to "she" and make that "sh" have an even higher pitch, but not very much. Otherwise we're again in weird-land. That's Putonghua x.

I think of them as parallel to Polish ś vs sz, with parallels in Polish ć vs cz or Croatian ć vs č. Both contrast sharp vs flat.

If you're interested, this is an old distinctive feature that was around for a few decades, so I should be putting [ and ] around them, but that's wonky and I don't wanna. It's been replaced by [ coronal ] (and in some contexts [ dorsal ], depending on the linguist's druthers). But again, I teach high school physical sciences and haven't been a student or scholar of any sort of linguistics for almost 20 years.