First, most leaders in the region remain skeptical about Gorbachev’s chances to implement his program in the Soviet Union itself—or, for that matter, to stay in power beyond the 1980s. They tend to assume that his tenure as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) will be short-lived. Even reform-minded officials, those who share Gorbachev’s ideas and root for him, doubt that he can decentralize the Soviet economy, modify the present system of subsidies and alter the artificial pricing system. Privately they stress the inevitable limits—and dangers—of glasnost in a one-party political system, pointing to the recent Chinese campaign against "bourgeois influences" in that country’s intellectual life. They claim that Gorbachev’s support in the Central Committee, even in the Politburo, is quite tenuous; they wonder why the CPSU’s crucial January 27-28, 1987, plenum was postponed several times and why speeches other than Gorbachev’s were not reported in the Soviet press. Some suspect, though they appear not to know for sure, that at least two Politburo members, Andrei Gromyko and Geidar Aliyev, expressed reservations about the pace if not the substance of Gorbachev’s reforms.