Comparativists have never fully settled this. Rene David's influential classification treated socialist law (the historical Soviet system and its export to Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere) as a family of its own, defined by the subordination of law to Communist Party policy and state ownership, even though its courts, codes and legal vocabulary were built on a civil-law base. Zweigert and Kotz, working from a different comparative method, are more skeptical that this political fact by itself creates a distinct legal FAMILY rather than a civil-law variant under unusual political conditions, and post-1989 practice complicates the question further: China's law today keeps socialist characteristics in name while its commercial and procedural codes converge heavily with mainstream civil law.
What would resolve this A comparative-law consensus classification would need to specify which feature is doing the definitional work, legal FORM (codes, courts, procedure, which stayed civil-law in shape) or POLITICAL FUNCTION (subordination to party policy, which did not), since the two point to different answers; a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction study tracking how far post-1989 codes have converged with ordinary civil law would also narrow the question for any single country.
OpenKonrad Zweigert and Hein Koetz; English translation by Tony Weir, An Introduction to Comparative Law