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The Chinese government seems highly reliable, and before Americans or German workers have lower salaries than Chinese workers, China would be the world's largest economy.
Just like industrial automation increased the risks of war and revolution in first world countries?
These trends usually don't change abruptly. You can't extrapolate them to 50 years, but 10 years seems reasonable. Moreover, as I answered to Vaniver, there were more fundamental reason for why China was expected to grow more than Japan or other first world countries.
Whatever.
Pick your favorite Bayesian-Solomonoffian-Yudkowskyian-Muehlhauserian-<insert strange surname>ian method and make your best predicion about the size of the Chinese economy in 2009 using only data available up to 1999. Let's see if your techniques pay rent.
There is a certain temptation here, to pick and choose data that was available in 1999 that leads to a correct conclusion about 2009. This may be unintentional - the result of noting that the result is correct and then not bothering to double-check the sources, or of noting that the result is incorrect and then ruthlessly double-checking the sources and eliminating or updating some, or possibly altering some parts of the predictive model used, until such time as the result is correct.
I would therefore, personally, be more impressed about a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2023, than by a correct prediction, made now, with regards to the size of the Chinese economy in 2009, regardless of what information is used to make the prediction.
There's far more than just a temptation. How do you even reconstruct the dataset one would've been working with in 1999? So many media sources or websites have disappeared or are completely inaccessible (enjoy 14 years of link rot), or the print versions are extremely time-consuming to access (public libraries keep only a few years of periodicals). In addition, people who turned out wrong about China will not be mentioning, citing, or linking their old 1999 pieces or projections even though they were drawing on plenty of germane information, so there's a double whammy of both references disappearing and knowledge of the disappeared materials itself disappearing.
One could pick a publication which has survived to the present and invested heavily in making its materials accessible, like the Economist, but what would such an exercise boot you? 'A hypothetical person like the 2013 me, inextricably contaminated by more than a decade of knowledge & experience, who read only everything mentioning "China" in the Economist up to 1999 and not any critics or dissenters or commentary, would estimate X% for China growing such-and-such.' Well, uh, ok...