Now — I’m — just — an — it? — I’m — not even — a — person — in — your — eyes?
That’s — not — just — rude — it’s unnecessary.
My — account — may — be — only — 5 — days — old — but — your — 小鸡鸡 — is — only — 5cm — long.
Doesn’t — feel — so — good — when — people — are — rude — for — no — reason — does — it?
We keep going in circles because you remain entrenched in an idealist framework, even while sometimes using materialist language. You constantly redirect the analysis back to historical origin, tradition, or civilizational continuity. When asked to identify concrete present-day mechanisms, the answer becomes imperial examinations, lineage culture, or institutional inheritance, rather than existing relations of production and authority.
When I distinguished between historical origin and present function, you treat that as if I am denying history itself, which allows the same claim to be restated without actually engaging the critique.
You have repeated this consistently. When comparative cases are raised (the USSR, France, Japan, Korea) instead of explaining what is materially different in China, you bypass comparison by asserting uniqueness. When patriarchy is discussed, you accept that it persists because it still performs material labor functions, but you refuse to apply that same standard to bureaucracy or lineage, never specifying what concrete economic function those traditions perform today. When the USSR collapse was raised, material transformation was replaced with cultural reversion.
This is why the discussion cannot move forward. You continusly treat history as an active causal force in itself, rather than something whose continued influence must be explained through present material conditions. Your analysis is idealist: tradition is allowed explanatory power independent of political economy. As long as that framing remains, we will keep talking past each other.
As for my writing style, it may come across as rigid or formulaic simply because this is not my native language, I am still far from 100% comfortable in it and thus fallback on standard easy to use structures to try best convey my thoughts.
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:
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:
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.
You are seemingly misunderstanding my argument, leading you to arguing against a position I did not make.
At no point did I ever infer or imply Chairman Mao was an extremist, irrational, or motivated by chaos. That framing is your insertion, not a logical consequence of what I said. Recognizing the limits and contradictions of the Cultural Revolution is not equivalent to repeating Western liberal narratives. Marxism does not require us to sanctify every tactic in order to defend the revolutionary line behind it.
Chairman Mao was obviously correct that class struggle continues under socialism. He was again obviously correct that bourgeois elements can emerge within the Party itself. He was yet again correct that institutions alone do not guarantee socialist consciousness. I disputed none of this.
Your reasoning begins to depart from dialectical materialism through what you identify as the material source of those contradictions.
You are treating “culture,” “tradition,” and long civilizational memory as semi-independent causal forces, capable of reproducing class society even after the economic base has been transformed. That is the upmost of idealism.
Marxism does not deny that ideology exists. It insists that ideology is shaped and reproduced by material relations. If culture itself were decisive, then land reform, collectivization, and socialist industrialization should have failed immediately. Instead, they succeeded in abolishing entire classes that had ruled China for millennia. That alone falsifies the idea that tradition possesses autonomous historical power.
What Chairman Mao identified was not tradition acting on socialism, but material contradictions produced inside society:
These are not cultural remnants. They are structural contradictions of transition. This distinction is important.
If reaction emerges because “Chinese tradition reproduces hierarchy,” then socialism is impossible not only in China, but anywhere with history. Marxism collapses into civilizational pessimism.
Chairman Mao never argued that. He argued that new bourgeois relations emerge from socialist production itself, not from the Tang dynasty.
On the USSR: its collapse does not demonstrate the supremacy of tradition over institutions. It demonstrates the failure to maintain proletarian political power over the state and economy. The material base had already shifted long before 1991, market mechanisms, managerial autonomy, labor commodification, and elite reproduction were already dominant.
What collapsed in 1991 was not socialism’s cultural shell reverting to tsarism. It was a system whose class character had already changed. There was no feudal restoration in Russia. There was capitalist restoration. Another important distinction.
Regarding education and class mobility: yes, examination-based advancement historically functioned as a route out of poverty. But again, you are mistaking continuity of form for continuity of essence. Modern educational competition exists because:
This is true in China, South Korea, Singapore, and also in France, Japan, and Germany. The Gaokao is not the imperial exam reborn. It is a modern mechanism of labor allocation under industrial conditions.
Forms may resemble each other. Their class content does not. This is precisely why Marx warned against superficial historical analogy.
Now to dialectics. You are absolutely correct that dialectical analysis must have explanatory and predictive power. But dialectics does not mean identifying one contradiction and projecting it linearly forward forever.
Dialectics analyzes motion through contradiction under specific material conditions. Your capitalism example works because Marx identified:
Now apply the same rigor to socialist transition.What is the dominant motion today? It is not tradition reproducing itself. It is the contradiction between:
From that contradiction arise:
These phenomena are not residues of feudalism. They are contradictions produced by development itself. This is why Chairman Mao emphasized continuing revolution , not because ancient culture would resurrect itself, but because new bourgeois relations continuously emerge unless actively constrained.
That struggle cannot be permanent chaos. It must be institutionalized, regulated, corrected, and rebalanced, precisely what was missing in the late Cultural Revolution period.
To say this is not to reject Chairman Mao and Mao Zedong Thought. It is to apply Mao Zedong Thought materially, not dogmatically.
Finally, your accusation that my position reduces to “there are problems and they are being corrected” misses the point entirely. The explanatory power lies here:
That predicts instability, anti-corruption cycles, policy reversals, re-centralization, and ideological tightening, exactly what we observe.
That is dialectics. Not cultural fatalism. Not civilizational inheritance. Not pessimism disguised as depth. Contradictions are real. They are sharp. They are dangerous. But they are not proof that history is repeating itself, only that socialism, is a long and uneven process of transformation, not a clean rupture where motion ceases.
Thank you for the thoughtful and generous words. I agree with your assessment: XHS has a strong descriptive grasp of China’s institutions and history, but like many people, especially on issues they are deeply emotionally invested in, that strength often leads to idealism rather than sustained materialist analysis. Descriptive knowledge alone does not guarantee correct conclusions; without consistently grounding contradictions in concrete class relations and material conditions, it becomes easy to drift into oscillations between pessimism and overcorrection.
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.
Their only source for this being anything other than a standard corruption issue seems to be an anonymous “person familiar with the closed door proceedings”?
I think you are mixing real problems with analyses that are not always materialist, and that has lead you to several incorrect leaps.
First, the existence of corruption cases does not demonstrate that the anti-corruption campaign has “failed.” From a dialectical perspective, the continued exposure of corruption indicates that contradictions inside the Party and state apparatus still exist and are being actively struggled over. Class struggle does not disappear under socialism; it changes form. To expect corruption to vanish permanently after one campaign misunderstands Marxism and treats socialism as a static condition rather than a transitional process.
Second, attributing corruption primarily to “thousands-year-old Chinese culture” is an idealist explanation. Scientific socialism through dialectical materialism does not locate social problems in culture or civilization essence, but in material conditions, institutional incentives, and class relations. 关系 is not some eternal cultural defect; it expands or contracts depending on whether material power and resources are concentrated without sufficient supervision. Similar patronage systems exist in every bureaucratic society. History does not operate through inherited moral DNA.
Third, the comparison between today’s anti-corruption struggle and the Cultural Revolution is not accurate. Mao identified the danger of capitalist restoration correctly, but the form that struggle took in the late 1960s severely damaged the productive forces, and Party unity. Scientific socialism requires not only correct political direction but correct methods. Rectification through institutional discipline, mass supervision, and rule-based governance is not “liberal victory,” but a lesson learned from earlier contradictions.
Fourth, framing current investigations as proof that “the entire bureaucracy and military chain of command is corrupted” is empirically and theoretically unsound. Marxism does not treat individual corruption cases as proof of total systemic collapse. If anything, the fact that senior figures (including those with strong political backgrounds) can be investigated demonstrates that no fixed aristocracy has been allowed to solidify, which is precisely what socialist discipline is meant to prevent.
Finally, reform does not mean abandoning socialism or repeating destructive cycles of upheaval. It means resolving contradictions at a higher level of development. The socialist state must constantly balance centralization with supervision, authority with accountability, and stability with struggle. That is not a betrayal of Mao’s analysis, but its continuation under new historical conditions.
Corruption is real. Internal contradictions are real. But explaining them through cultural fatalism, or assuming that purges alone define success or failure, moves away from dialectical materialism and toward pessimistic determinism. Socialism is not proven by the absence of contradictions, but by the capacity to recognize, confront, and resolve them over time.
She was going to follow the MacArthur school of thought, nuking the border into a sea of irradiated cobalt to own the commies and greedy refugees.
It’s just greatman theory it’s a core part of the reactionary liberal idealist viewpoint.
I have activated the wehrmacht to gas and beat those who dare attempt to protest the gestapo. Applause please.
The burger reich is so fucking unserious
stalked me across multiple threads
Reflect on what? Looking back on all my interactions here outside of like one misunderstanding (which was later clarified) I haven’t done anything other than generally politely give and explain my views on things, unless someone is openly hostile. Is getting your 
energy matched too much for you?
You really seem to give af scrolling my profile to throw a tantrum though? Is there something going on in your life? Do you need someone to talk to? Know youre not alone and you can reach out to those around you or get professional services if you need it.
Yet I am a person and when talking about benefit of the doubt you were talking about me.
You could have said “them” you chose “it”.