Linguocognitive Aspect of Russia’s Image Formation in the Context of Ukranian Conflict Representation in Chinese Non-Institutional Media Discourse

The article studies the conceptual characteristics of Russia’s image formed in the non-institutional media of the People’s Republic of China through the representation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which fills a gap in Russian applied linguistics. The study develops? a cognitive-discursive approach to analyzing information impact and contributes to the theory of mass communication within which the formation and adjustment of events’ image is considered as a result of its conceptualisation, categorisation and interpretation in the recipient’s consciousness. The two main research methods were the quantitative density and qualitative content analysis, in which key words and collocations with them were studied; another one was a critical discourse analysis. A corpus of 480 media texts collected from the Chinese social network Zhihu was studied. Based on the description of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict obtained as a result of discourse analysis, potential changes in the conceptual image of Russia formed in the Chinese linguoculture have been modelled: negative – “an aggressive nation”, “an irresponsible country”, positive – “a fighter for justice”, “a pillar of traditionalism”. The results obtained can be used for prognostic purposes and for further study of the mechanisms of modelling the image of public institutions and the formation of public opinion in general.