Except for “Debrett’s Peerage”, no institution pays as much attention to titles as China’s Communist Party. It has already conferred a lot of them on its leader, Xi Jinping. Recently it has topped them off with a description hitherto mainly applied to Mao: lingxiu. It means leader, but conveys far more reverence than the usual word, lingdao. Last month two of the country’s most authoritative newspapers described Mr Xi as lingxiu. Now comes the video. On February 9th state media released a five-minute film called “The People’s Lingxiu” on WeChat, a social-media platform. It shows a portly Mr Xi greeting admirers (some are pictured), eating dumplings and inspecting a toilet. In 2016 Mr Xi was officially anointed as the “core” of the leadership, a moniker never conferred upon his predecessor, Hu Jintao. This was partly intended as a warning to recalcitrant officials that Mr Xi must be obeyed. If the party chief feels the need for further title inflation, perhaps the lower-downs are still not getting the message.