Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)

Although that is somewhat of a simplification, it is certainly more true of Chinese than of English.

The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.

The vast majority of country names in Chinese do not contain 国 but are rather purely phonetic transcriptions. Only a handful of countries have 国 in the common name.

That's true, but I think the full name usually has, just as the full names of Beijing Shanghai Tianjin etc contain 市 even though the short names doesn't.

And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.

Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …

Sounds like this won't be news for you, but for others in the thread, the Chinese sometimes play around a lot with puns and rhymes in transliterated names.

Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en

An example from the thread[1]:

Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar"

This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse").

[1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400

I recently learnt the Chinese name for San Francisco: Old Gold Mountain. From the gold rush days.

Similarly, New Gold Mountain is Melbourne Australia near where the Australian gold rush started soon after.