The paper covers part of the results obtained by a group of scholars from Volgograd State Socio-Pedagogical University during the work on the project: «Narrative as a medium of conceptualisation of reality in the context of Russian-Chinese intercultural communication» supported by the Russian Foundation for Humanities. The authors explain the theoretical approaches, methods and key dimensions of narrative analysis. They further analyse the culturally specific Chinese narrative genres «chuanqi», «huaben», «huagu», «errenzhuan», «shulaibao», etc.