I don't think the issue is statistics per se - the question is how much care has been taken in these infrastructure constructions.
It's not hard to lay tens of thousands of miles of shoddy track and run screaming locomotives down them. It's another game altogether to painstakingly design this system to be fault-tolerant and accept a wide range of failure modes.
The issue isn't that 35 people were killed out of millions transported, it's that the system seemingly had no account for a failure mode as simple as "train ahead loses power".
Getting something 95% safe is pretty cheap. Getting something 99.99% safe is monumentally expensive, and that really characterizes infrastructure development between the developed and developing world.
To circle back to the original point: OP is saying that China's HSR infrastructure was seen as an example to the world, creating controversy about the efficiency and cost of infrastructure in the developed world. That is, until you account for the fact that this infrastructure simply isn't built to the same standard as it is in the developed world.
It's not hard to lay tens of thousands of miles of shoddy track and run screaming locomotives down them. It's another game altogether to painstakingly design this system to be fault-tolerant and accept a wide range of failure modes.
The issue isn't that 35 people were killed out of millions transported, it's that the system seemingly had no account for a failure mode as simple as "train ahead loses power".
Getting something 95% safe is pretty cheap. Getting something 99.99% safe is monumentally expensive, and that really characterizes infrastructure development between the developed and developing world.
To circle back to the original point: OP is saying that China's HSR infrastructure was seen as an example to the world, creating controversy about the efficiency and cost of infrastructure in the developed world. That is, until you account for the fact that this infrastructure simply isn't built to the same standard as it is in the developed world.