I obviously don’t disagree that historical trajectory matters. Of course it does. No materialist analysis can be done without tracing how concrete institutions, policies, and class relations developed over time. The post-reform economic path you list absolutely shaped the current structure of Chinese society.

Where I think your analysis is flawed is that you treat history itself as the determining force, rather than the material relations operating within each historical stage.

Historical materialism does not mean “go back as far as possible.” It means identifying which relations of production are dominant at a given moment, and which have already been negated. When you explain present contradictions primarily through imperial institutions and civilizational continuity, the analysis shifts from materialism into historical essentialism.

The imperial examination system was not an abstract cultural mechanism. It was a superstructure rooted in a landlord economy based on agrarian surplus extraction. That economic base was fundamentally destroyed in the twentieth century. Land reform eliminated the landlord class. Collectivization dismantled hereditary property relations. Socialist industrialization replaced agrarian production as the dominant foundation of society.

What remains today is not the continuation of that system, but a modern bureaucratic structure necessary to govern an industrialized society of 1.4 billion people. Bureaucracy is not uniquely Chinese. The Soviet Union developed similar contradictions without Confucianism, dynasties, or imperial examinations. To explain modern governance primarily through ancient lineage systems is not materialist it is a prime example of cultural determinism.

Chairman Mao understood Chinese history deeply, yes. But he did not conclude that socialism was threatened by “thousands of years of tradition.” He concluded that new bourgeois elements emerge within socialist society itself.

The danger lay not in ancient habits, but in the material conditions of socialist transition: unequal authority, division of labor, persistence of commodity relations, and the separation of cadres from the masses. That is why Mao spoke of “capitalist roaders,” not “imperial bureaucrats.” His analysis was forward-looking, not civilizationally fatalistic. If the problem were simply inherited culture, socialism would be impossible by definition.

On the question of billionaires, your historical description is largely correct but again, description is not analysis.

Those reforms were not accidental deviations nor ideological capitulation. They were responses to concrete material constraints: technological backwardness, capital shortage, external blockade, and the collapse of the socialist camp. Market mechanisms were introduced to develop productive forces under conditions of extreme pressure. The emergence of private capital was a contradiction produced by that process, not its purpose.

Dialectical materialism does not ask whether billionaires “should exist” in the abstract. It asks whether they have become a ruling class. Who controls political power? Who commands the strategic sectors? Who determines national development?

Class power is decisive, not income concentration alone. This contradiction is real, unresolved, and openly acknowledged, but unresolved contradiction is not the same as restoration. Marxism does not operate on moral comfort; it operates on balance of forces.

On the PLA purges: you are again right that these are extremely serious events. No one should downplay that. But seriousness does not automatically imply institutional breakdown. A military whose highest commanders cannot be investigated is far more dangerous than one where they can be. The PLA’s most unstable period was not today, but the era when military units were running businesses, trading land, and operating beyond political supervision. That was addressed precisely through internal rectification.

Contradictions within the Party and military are not evidence that socialism has failed. They are evidence that class struggle continues under new conditions. The mistake is moving from “these contradictions exist” to “therefore the system is fundamentally corrupted beyond reform.” That leap is not dialectical; it is pessimistic metaphysics.

You are correctly observing real tensions: bureaucratic stratification, elite reproduction pressures, market influence, and institutional inertia. Where your analysis falters is treating these contradictions as expressions of an ancient, almost immutable structure.

China today is not governed by imperial legacy. It is governed by the contradictions of rapid socialist development within a hostile capitalist world system. Those contradictions cannot be purged away overnight, but neither are they proof of inevitable degeneration.

Dialectical materialism does not promise purity. It explains motion. And motion means struggle, correction, instability, and transformation.

How the mechanism for class mobility arose in China, and how that evolved into the deep bureaucracy of the modern Chinese state today.

This part is always so interesting to me, because on the face of it the imperial examination system is deeply egalitarian in a way no other ancient civilisation approached. The idea that it was not genes but effort and intelligence that would allow you access to a better life is astounding to see so far back. There’s always been a tension between trying to co-opt that examination system for the already existing great families, but its existence at all is always so shocking to me. Mirrors a lot the Roman dominate (the late empire, post crisis of the Third Century) where governors and imperial workers could no longer be based on the patrician class because they were functionally useless, and they needed to implement a kind of meritocracy for commoners to actually run thing.

I don’t think the two of you are really disagreeing. Guanxi is obviously historically embedded in Chinese culture, but it’s far from unique. Almost all aristocratic cultures rely on corruption via nepotism/connections to perpetuate themselves. It’s no different to the Roman patronage system for example.

Social norms and behaviour are taught, inherited, and reinforced with continuity through generations. It’s hard to change how a society regulates access to and accumulation of resources, even with a cultural revolution (lowercase). At its core, guanxi comes from people wanting to secure the future of their children and trading favours to do so. We are also hard wired to favour those we are close to / in our perceived in-groups. It’s emergent from basic human motivators. I think it’s futile to assume we can re-educate the corpus of society to such a degree that we override those motivators. The best we can do imo is to remove the financial rewards people get from corruption, which requires dismantling / restructuring the liberal economy. Even then I think you’d be hard pressed to eradicate guanxi, it’s just that people won’t be able to enrich themselves to obscene levels.

Maybe that’s defeatist idk