The Ukrainian leader’s message has been unvarying: His country’s bloody confrontation with Russian President Vladimir Putin is Europe’s fight, too.

Called dermatoglyphics, it relies on the assumption that the tiny ridges on a person’s fingertips form permanent, unvarying patterns that are unique to that individual.

But the two slogans, so unvarying that they rarely drew attention, were not in Mr. Xi’s report to the congress, which began last Sunday and ended Saturday.

She was, he said, so “unvarying in her pole star radiance that we have perhaps been lulled into thinking that she might be in some way eternal.”

“The person who, all the surveys say, appears most often in our dreams. So unvarying in her pole-star radiance that we have perhaps been lulled into thinking that she might be in some way eternal.”