The entire field of mechanistic interpretability has gotten nowhere. The formalized, "causal" understanding of latent space conceptualization isn't any better than an LLM cargo cult.

It's wholly possible that you could study one set of weights for decades, and find nothing. There's no guarantee that any patterns outside of human language exist in that data. In this specific context, it's satisfying enough to state that [Chinese] and [boat] were both tokens in the tokenizer, activated by a feedforward pass through weights that favor [boat] after [Chinese]. There's not any guaranteed solution to this. There's not even any guaranteed problem; that hallucination is an expected behavior.