The problem of denotation of the national culture in the Chinese language

The article analyzes the semantic meaning of the con-cepts ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘ethnos’ in Russian and Chi-nese languages. The author studies in detail the seman-tic paradigms of the Chinese word ‘Min Tsu’ (民族), which is interpreted as ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘nationality’, ‘ethnic group’, ‘national’, ‘ethnic’. The author argues that in Chinese literature there is no distinction be-tween such concepts as ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘ethnos’. The author believes that the analysis of the Chinese culture shows that the concepts of ‘national culture’ and ‘eth-nic culture’ are the same