I think I understand your point more clearly now, and you’re right that institutions do not vanish magically when one mode of production replaces another. I like all marxists fully accepts that superstructural forms can persist, mutate, and be repurposed under new material conditions. Patriarchy is indeed the classic example to explain this.

But this is exactly where precision matters. Patriarchy persists under capitalism not because of cultural memory alone, but because it continues to serve material functions: reproduction of labor power, unpaid domestic labor, inheritance control, and stabilization of wage relations. Its survival is not explained by history, but by utility to the dominant mode of production. Without that utility, patriarchy would decay rapidly regardless of tradition. The same standard must be applied to bureaucracy, lineage, and examination systems.

If a social form persists, scientific socialism through dialectical materialism demands we ask: what material role does it currently play? Not where it came from, but why it continues to reproduce itself today. This is where I think your argument still slips from materialism toward historical determinism. You are correct that China has unusual institutional continuity. That fact alone, however, does not explain causality. Continuity describes form; it does not explain motion.

What reproduces hierarchy today is not the memory of imperial lineage, but concrete mechanisms:

1. cadre evaluation systems
2. administrative ranking structures
3. control over resource allocation
4. credential monopolies
5. urban–rural stratification
6. uneven regional development

These mechanisms would generate elite reproduction even if the imperial examinations had never existed. This is precisely why similar phenomena appear in the USSR, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, and even France’s grandes écoles system, societies with no shared civilizational origin.

The resemblance is structural, not genealogical. On gaokao: yes, there is historical resonance. But resonance is not determination. The gaokao functions today as a labor-allocation mechanism under industrial conditions. Its brutality comes from scarcity and competition, not Confucian morality. If economic structure changed such that upward mobility was not concentrated into narrow credential channels, the social meaning of education would change accordingly, just as it already has for segments of the urban middle class.

That demonstrates material causation, not cultural destiny. Regarding “unwritten rules,” when have I denied their existence. But unwritten rules are not ancient ghosts; they are informal adaptations to power concentration. Wherever access to resources depends on approval from superiors, informal relations emerge, whether in Chinese ministries, Soviet factories, Wall Street firms, or Western universities.

Calling this “lineage culture” risks obscuring the real issue: bureaucratic power without sufficient mass supervision. Chairman Mao understood this clearly. The Cultural Revolution was not an attempt to annihilate tradition for its own sake. It was an attempt (however flawed in execution) to prevent the crystallization of a new bureaucratic class by mobilizing the masses against administrative privilege. Its target was not history. Its biggest target was power.

That is why Chairman Mao emphasized “those in authority taking the capitalist road,” not scholars, families, or customs as such. He did not argue that culture autonomously reproduces class society. He argued that class society reproduces culture. This is a fundamental difference. If tradition itself were the decisive force, then socialist transformation would depend primarily on ideological purification. Chairman Mao rejected that. He insisted that ideological struggle must be rooted in mass participation and material change, not moral critique.

This is also why later socialist practice emphasized institutionalization rather than permanent mobilization, not because the problem disappeared, but because contradiction must be handled at a level consistent with development.

So yes forms evolve. Yes history leaves traces. Yes people experience continuity in daily life. But dialectical materialism draws a firm line:

1. History conditions forms.
2. Material relations determine motion.
3. When explanation begins to rely on civilizational uniqueness rather than present material function, analysis loses predictive power and turns inward.

The question is not and should not be whether tradition exists. The question is what reproduces power today. That is where scientific socialists must always place their focus, not in inherited memory, but in living relations of production and authority that can actually be transformed.