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Abstract: The topic of the article is related to the study of the borrowing process, which, due to the globalization process that is taking place at all levels of life of the Russian society, is highlighted as a factor of modern language development, which in turn determines not only a voluminous array of foreign language innovations, but also contributes to changes in the nature of functioning of words as elements of the lexical system. The object of consideration includes lexical units that are borrowed into modern Russian from Chinese. Dictionaries of foreign words, neographic reference books, as well as explanatory dictionaries reflecting language change were used as a source of study material. In addition, the study uses data from the National Corpus of the Russian language and modern media, which ensure the entry of foreign language vocabulary into the Russian language most actively. In connection with the above, the material under study includes Chinese foreign-language lexemes representing various areas of life of the Russian society and different versions of the common language – standard (literary language) and sub-standard; and it covers not only words borrowed at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries but also units that had been previously borrowed into Russian and became relevant – sometimes after a certain speech “oblivion”. Semantic transformations of Chinaisms reflect the growing significance of Chinese lexical units in the linguistic consciousness of speakers of Russian. It has been established that such changes are of a different nature, since they correlate with the structure of a polysemantic word as a whole, and with the structure of a separate lexico-semantic variant. The article describes semantic shifts characteristic of the conceptual-denotative and connotative components of semantic structure. The transformation of the semes that demonstrate both secondary nomination and genus-species derivation is subject to special analysis. It is noted that analysis of the semantic dynamics of Chinese words in the Russian language suggests a tendency towards the semantic dynamics of Chinese lexical units in the Russian language system.