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It's just a phonetic loan (A-mei-rica) represented by a character with positive associations (they could also have chosen e.g. 没国 "without country", but that would've been impolite). Best not to read too much into it.

England is called the country of heroes, France the country of law, Germany the country of virtue... people rarely pay attention to the literal meaning.



Curiously, what is India called?


The word for India has been around for much longer, Wiktionary has an extensive section on the etymology: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8D%B0%E5%BA%A6#Chinese




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