To be fair, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were based on the older New Economic Policy or NEP from the 1920s USSR, so it had been tried at that point. It was scrapped

To be fair, Deng Xiaoping's reforms were based on the older New Economic Policy or NEP from the 1920s USSR, so it had been tried at that point. It was scrapped in the USSR for other reasons, not because it failed.