There is a certain temptation here, to pick and choose data that was available in 1999 that leads to a correct conclusion about 2009.

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...