Never mind when English-speaking rhetoricians started claiming that "in Chinese, 'crisis' is 'danger+opportunity'"; Language Log has cites. (I would like to know how native Chinese speakers use the word, instead of being reminded that etymology doesn't control meaning.)
When did English-speaking rhetoricians forget that 'crisis' in English originally meant both hope and fear? It was a medical term; I think Maturin uses it in 's novels, and I would expect it in, oh, Tom Brown's Schooldays and some Little Women and the diptheria and scarlet fever scenes of Victorian literature generally. The crisis is the moment at which the patient's fate is decided. Depending on the disease, or the narrative, the whole household is muffled, or everyone is rushing in and out of the sickroom with linens and water. Either way, 'crisis' means that there is a chance of a good outcome if we do something about the problem, which is, I would suppose, the idea that the users of spurious Chinese are trying to get across.
From the citations in the OED, the gloomier use of 'crisis' as a metaphor for the disease itself and not its turning-point dates back to the mid-nineteenth century--and is specifically political and economic in use. Perhaps politics is especially prone to making a word pejorative by using it as a euphemism.
So wrote clew in Word.