Updated “Reading Russian newspapers” course in the context of humanitarian education reform in China

The “new era” in China, the reform of humanitarian education and the “Russian Language +” concept implementation substantiate the need to modernize the course Reading Russian newspapers within the system of foreign language education. The aim of the study is to define new objectives for the course, to determine ways of updating Chinese textbooks for teaching newspaper reading, and to develop an original model of newspaper text analysis focused on teaching multidisciplinary specialists, fostering personality development in the spirit of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and cultivating media literacy. The materials include Chinese textbooks on newspaper reading (2002-2023) and studies by Russian and Chinese scholars; the methods applied were comprehensive theoretical analysis and comparative research. The findings reveal that the existing textbooks fail to meet the new objectives; they do not reflect China’s current ideological agenda, do not build knowledge of Russia’s media landscape, do not teach students to interpret a text as a reflection of a newspaper’s concept, do not develop skills of critical media analysis, and do not foster intercultural competence. The author identifies directions for their modernization, including the renewal of newspaper text corpora, the strengthening of students’ analytical and project-based activities, and the use of digital tools. A practice-oriented model of working with newspaper texts is proposed, which integrates media-linguistic, cultural, and ideological components. The prospect of the researchis the creation of a new textbook capable of realizing the educational and ideological potential of the discipline in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative .