Ethnonyms form a considerable part in the phraseology of a given language fixating contacts between countries as well as cultural attitudes, the latter forming ethnic stereotypes. This paper’s aim is to investigate semantic types of nominal phrases with the ethnonyms Chinese and Russian, based both on lexicographical data and literary texts in the English language and their cultural values. The study divides phrases with ethnonyms into two major groups: those with literal concrete denotative meaning and those with a metaphorical one. For the former, denotative meaning is the basic meaning of the phrases. And the latter are shown to be widely used in fiction, both with positive and negative connotations.