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Abstract: Idioms are expressive means used in speech to express the relations between the language and the life of people, its history, traditions and customs. We treat idiom as a phrase, which is used by the native speakers for a long time, has a certain set of components, a certain meaning that is not equal to the meaning of its components; in a sentence it is a set-expression. The author studies five rhetoric tropes found in Russian and Chinese idioms: 1)simile; 2)metaphor; 3)synecdoche; 4) metonymy; 5) hyperbola and analyzes they use in Chinese and Russian. In this paper the sphere of the analysis of the idioms in Chinese and Russian is limited to the semantic field of expression people’s emotions. Apart from the central semantic field, the author singles out four peripheral fields connected with: 1) joy, merriment, happiness; 2) incredulity, astonishment; 3) resentment, strong feeling of anger; 4)anxiety, embarrassment. The author underlines the cognitive aspect of this research.