I am sorry but I am going to be very negative to this train and to the Chinese Government, why would you create a High Speed Train when your record is not the best and definately not very safe. I would not be surprised to see a high death rate if the Chinese do run this train on their rail network.
The train was probably in development for some time before the recent very public problems caused them to scale back their plans. That said, it remains to be seen if they're going to really fix their problems or paper them over and go back to trying for high speed before they're ready.
I think the fundamental problem is that it takes more than technology to make a railroad. You need the mindset that says you do things a certain way because it is proven to work, and you make changes to that carefully and incrementally. And you need that throughout the organization, so one impatient manager can't say "we need to keep the schedule, run the trains normally even without signals tonight". When you don't, people die (and China's not alone in that, it just seems to be doing it more often of late than most places, where such failures are rare exceptions). High speed rail just makes the safety margin smaller. You need to have a safe normal railway (and the people who make it work) before you can have a high-speed one.
It's clear from even the limited articles I've read that some of China's problems come from cutting corners on safety to contain costs, and to maintain schedules when there are problems. They need to learn that there's a reason most railways know better than to do that. They also appear to have some of the usual big-government-contract problems of corruption and things not being built to design (hardly a problem limited to China).
Both are likely symptoms of China's rapid expansion and modernization of infrastructure. And probably not limited to railways. The difference is that highway failures due to these causes will mostly show up in potholes and bridges that fall down twenty years from now (again, not a problem limited to China). Trains have less margin for error, and in most of the world even when run by governments, they're full of employees who know the cost of cutting corners.
To disturbman's point, I believe China does have some "high speed rail" lines (I don't know much about it though), but I'd agree that most of their network isn't high-speed, and even the parts that supposedly are would appear to have problems they need to fix first.
Still, this train looks more like a technology demonstrator than a prototype for operation (I could be wrong on that). There's value to pushing the technology forward, even if they aren't ready to put it into practice themselves.
