To Xi, and the rest of the leadership of the CCP, Gorbachev is a cautionary tale and an object of contempt. As they see it, Gorbachev simply didn’t have the brains or the balls to keep the lid on; he wanted change, and got a revolution instead. That will never happen in China.
The irony here is that Xi and Gorbachev had the same vision for their supposedly socialist societies–just enough capitalism to permit the country to compete internationally, but no more. The difference is they started from different places. Gorbachev tried to reform a stagnant system, and the results speak for themselves; Xi wants to suck the dynamism out of an economy that was working perfectly well in order to maintain stability, his overriding goal.