Gorbachev and some of the people around him variously drew on the experiences of the Chinese and the so-called Asian Tigers (according to Chris Miller's The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy). The Soviets did plan Special Economic Zones, the most prominent of which was in Vladivostok, partly because they wanted to receive investment from the Asian powers, and to potentially cash in on some Chinese labor (the areas in the far east tended to be starved for labor). These did draw on the experiences of the Chinese.

The problem that they ran into immediately was that labor costs were high, relatively speaking. Remember that when the Chinese SEZs were established, Chinese workers received some of the lowest wages in the world, and this was true in other Asian countries in the 1970s. This was how they could attract investment in textile industries. Soviet wages were still lower than the equivalent in the west, but that didn't mean much when there were cheaper places to go.

It also didn't help that the Vladivostok SEZ gets off the ground in 1988, which is relatively late in the game for the Soviet Empire. Even as it did attract some foreign investment, it did so in a generally unfavorable economic climate, and one that worsened over time, which meant that it was constantly behind the curve.