It must have been a slightly uncomfortable moment for the village official.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, had come to Shibadong village to gauge conditions in a poor corner of Hunan Province. Upon entering the home of a family whose sole electrical appliance was a fluorescent bulb, the most powerful man in China was asked by the 64-year-old matriarch, “What do I call you?,” according to a report from Xinhua, the state-run news agency. It was a polite way of saying, “Who are you?”

The village official stepped in quickly, telling his constituent, “This is the general secretary.”

Mr. Xi, in a version of retail politicking with Chinese characteristics, then asked the woman’s age, and learning she was four years his senior, called her “older sister.” He proceeded with several detailed questions about her family’s livelihood: Were they getting enough to eat? Did they have fruit trees? Raise pigs? For sale or their own consumption?

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Mr. Xi’s focus on the details of agricultural economics in Xiangxi Prefecture, a region of steep valleys that is dominated by members of the Tujia and Miao ethnic groups, shouldn’t be a surprise. The photograph of him sitting with the woman and her husband is not unlike one of him as a young county Communist Party secretary in Zhengding County, Hebei Province, in 1983. Rural study trips by Chinese officials, and subsequent images of them meeting with the people, are a staple of the official portrayals of Chinese leaders dating to Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic.

What’s different about this latest depiction of Mr. Xi is the attention that one citizen’s lack of knowledge of China’s new leader was given by the official news media. During the Mao era, such ignorance was inconceivable. The individual power and profile of China’s top leaders have declined greatly since his time. Still, it is hard to imagine such an an interaction being played up during the term of Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Whether in photos with his pants rolled up in a rainstorm or sweating through his shirt while meeting with earthquake victims in Sichuan, state media over the past year have emphasized the idea of Mr. Xi as a man of the people.

His trip to a remote region of Hunan is a reminder that, while China now has nearly 600 million Internet users, there is another half of the country’s population without Internet access. In the case of Shibadong village, there are people without televisions or the means to readily know, outside perhaps the occasional newspaper, just what the country’s leader looks like.

As the Communist Party’s current Central Committee plans for its Third Plenum, which begins on Nov. 9, and discussion turns to possible economic policy changes, it’s a signal that amid China’s rapid growth, Mr. Xi remains aware of the needs of the nation’s poorest. And as a leader who has cast himself as a man of the people, he doesn’t mind that one of the people doesn’t immediately know who he is.