I think the oppression was sort of secondary and that the most important thing to keep was the corruption.

In fact, I think that that was exactly how they each sold the reforms to the rest of their respective governments - by convincing the politicians that they could implement some measure of capitalism without losing any of their privilege - that in fact, if they played it right, they could do even better collecting bribes from private business owners than they ever did siphoning off public funds.

tbf, Gorbachev’s reforms maintained much more state control of the economy than Deng’s did.