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The question of formation of language image of China in the Russian mass media is considered. The relevance of the study is due to the current political context, in which the creation of a positive image of a country for its residents and for representatives of other cultures is one of the tasks of domestic and foreign policy. The material for the study were the Russian lexemes for China, PRC, Celestial, Celestial Empire, Celestial Oecumene, which are found in publicistic texts extracted from the National corpus of the Russian language, the newspapers “Коммерсантъ” and “Аргументы и факты.” Through the discourse analysis the meanings associated with these proper names actualized in the contexts are identified. On the basis of the revealed pragmatic information, a dictionary entry is compiled in accordance with the principles of lexicographical description of synonymic series presented in the New Explanatory Dictionary of Synonyms of the Russian Language edited by Yu. D. Apresyan. It is noted that the ideas of the Moscow Semantic School (hereinafter - MSS) are very popular in China. It is shown that the integral dictionary description of synonymic series can be applied to proper names, which is not represented in either Russian or Chinese linguistics. The author comes to the conclusion that the image of China as a world leader with specific socio-cultural and political characteristics is formed in the Russian information space.