John Fairbank

According to Linda Jakobson's A Million Truths A Decade in China, no profession has a worse record than China-watchers who try to predict the future of the country.

Even the revered historian John K. Fairbank wrote in 1967 that "the private automobile age, just dawning in Russia, will never reach China."

But it did. And Fairbank was still alive to witness it.

A safer course, according to Jakobson, would be "to follow the parlance of a weatherman: "Mostly clear and sunny, with possible rain and thunderstorms."