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

[Igel]

7. And yet it's the official transliteration endorsed by the PRC's academy of whatever.

Giles-Wade's on the out, unless you're hard-core Taiwanese. Pinyin's not a bad compromise--it's phonemic, if not phonetic.

Strictly speaking, Pinyin also has tone numbers or diacritics that we conveniently ignore--we want to show sensitivity, with rolled rs and the like, but, you know, sensitivity is local and we don't care about tone and tone sandhi in Chinese languages. We have the ability but not the will to be equitably sensitive. Odd, that.

Recently read that "brainwashing" is a calque from Mandarin xi nao, but that didn't tell me much. After a few minutes noodling/googling, I got x ǐ nǎo, which in my 1st year text was to be realized as [ xí nào ], two words added to my aural/oral vocab but not my written. Oddly, the publication, punctilious in its use of Spanish diacritics and the occasional African-language diacritic, bailed entirely on Mandarin. "Equitable" and "sensitive" apparently involves thinking locally, acting locally. I found the diacritics in a source unusable on DU. (That gives me heartburn.)

(I do draw the line at non-Roman alphabets. I'm okay with some, but there are scores of them. Kufic, sure; Naskh gives me pain; I knew devanagari at one point, but it's gone, while Hebrew, Slavic, most Cyrillic Turkic and even some less frequent Roman varieties are fine, along with Gk, Attic/Byzantine/Modern. Still, I figure I'm a bit of an outlier. But do include the diacritics in transliteration. And diacritics in non-translation.)