Most of the metaphtonymy studies, for the past 20 years, focus merely on language phenomenon, several of which cover the multi-modal metaphtonymy but without deep explanation and neglect its social pragmatic function. Therefore, this paper took China-related discourses in The Economist as examples, criticizing and analyzing the construction function of multi-modal metaphtonymy of China’s image. After analyzing 94 political cartoon discourses, this paper found that in light of cognitive mechanism, political cartoons in alignment with verbal texts tap the great potentials of spatial superimposition, intersection and fusion to create fictive metaphor scenarios in which multiple metonymy chains and metaphor clusters interact at multi-levels, rendering systematic mapping of conceptual elements, reasoning, assumptions, judgements and evaluations from the source domain to the target domain. What’s more, these images, in aspects of type and structure, impose and highlight certain negative attributes mapped to the features of China, molding its negative image. On this account, this paper calls for intensive social studies of multimodal metaphor and metonymy to uncover the ideological nature underlying the creative political cartoons.