The subject of this study is the interpretation of the tonality of Russian media speech within the context of the Chinese linguistic tradition. The object of analysis is Russian media speech as a set of discourse practices and linguistic means shaping the evaluative perspective of contemporary public communication. The paper examines lexical-semantic markers of tonality, pragmatic mechanisms of its construction, and culturally conditioned models of media text reception. Particular attention is given to differences in expressiveness, negative evaluation, and norms of categorical stance in Russian and Chinese linguistic traditions. The study explores how tonality functions as an integrative parameter of media discourse and how it is reinterpreted in intercultural interaction, leading to stable interpretative shifts in Chinese reception of Russian media texts. The methodological framework combines discourse analysis, the comparative method, and pragmalinguistic analysis to identify the institutional conditioning of tonality and the mechanisms of its intercultural interpretation. The novelty of the study lies in conceptualizing the tonality of Russian media speech as a culturally sensitive functional-pragmatic category shaped by differing models of public evaluation and pragmatic expectations. The findings show that interpretative shifts stem not from factual distortion but from differences in categorical thresholds, evaluative explicitness, and conflict conceptualization. Russian media speech tends toward explicit evaluation and polarization, whereas the Chinese communicative model favors contextuality and harmonization. The results refine the theoretical status of tonality in media discourse and contribute to intercultural media linguistics, with implications for communication, translation, and language teaching.