Zou Yan's system outlived Zou Yan's own school by being absorbed rather than by being preserved intact. In the second century BCE, Dong Zhongshu, advising the Han emperor Wudi, built a comprehensive correlative cosmology that fused yin and yang and the five phases with Confucian ethics and political theory, arguing that human affairs, the ruler's own conduct chief among them, are bound to the cosmic order by resonance, so that a virtuous or vicious court produces matching signs in the natural world, favorable omens or disasters, rather than the two realms running independently of one another.
Dong's synthesis won official standing in a way Zou Yan's own school never had. Emperor Wudi's adoption of Confucianism as state orthodoxy carried Dong's correlative framework with it, and the five phases became the organizing scheme behind court ritual, calendar reform, medicine and the theory of dynastic succession for centuries afterward, exactly the political use of the system the first article describes taking root at the level of imperial ideology rather than academic debate. The cost of that success was independence: the bibliographic tradition that once listed Yin Yang as one of six schools alongside the Confucians and the Daoists stopped needing to, because by Dong Zhongshu's generation there was no longer a separate Yin Yang position left outside Confucianism to record, only a set of categories so thoroughly built into Han state thought that no later school needed to claim authorship of them.