This paper is devoted to the description of the main works of the Russian linguist Yu.S. Stepanov, where signs are presented as the main tool to express cultural concepts. The author attempts to localize Stepanov’s theory in the Chinese humanitarian scientific tradition. In the Russian scientific community, there are several significant works in the field of the theory of semiotics, for example, works of M.M. Bakhtin, R.O. Jacobson, Yu.M. Lotman. Yuri Sergeyevich Stepanov, being one of the main representatives of the Russian semiotic school, made a great contribution to the development of this direction. He published the first complete introduction of semiotics in Russia, which defines semiotics and main tendentious of semiotics research. The results of cultural-semiotic studies were summarized by Stepanov to the theory of evolutionary semiotic series of cultural concepts. The next step in his works became the semiotic portrait, which was used by scholar in order to analyze the main concept of Russian culture “Man-god”. Nowadays Stepanov’s research results are widely used by scholars in different fields, such as literature, linguistics, and culturology, etc.