BEIJING — One Sunday last month, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traveled to a village in the mountains of Sichuan Province. He wore an olive overcoat with a fur collar, which he kept zipped up even when he entered an adobe house to meet with villagers. Around an indoor fire pit, he sat among a circle of people wearing traditional clothes of the Yi minority group.

“How did the Communist Party come into being?” he asked at one point as he extolled the virtues of socialism. Without hesitating, he answered. “It was established to lead people to a happy life,” he said, and then he added:

“That’s what we should do forever.”

Mr. Xi’s remark — specifically its open-ended pledge — suddenly resonates more deeply than before. Barring the unexpected, delegates gathering this week for the annual National People’s Congress in Beijing will rubber-stamp constitutional changes that will enable Mr. Xi to remain the country’s leader indefinitely by eliminating presidential term limits.

Mr. Xi, who will turn 65 in June, has done more than any of his predecessors to create a public persona as an avuncular man of the people, even as he has maneuvered behind the scenes with a ruthless ambition to dominate China’s enigmatic elite politics.

The government’s propaganda apparatus regularly depicts him as a firm yet adoring patriarch and leader who fights poverty and corruption at home while building China’s prestige abroad as an emerging superpower.