Beijing is a cool city. Never mind the old buildings, pollution, traffic jams and random development: it's the people that are cool. The dazzling urbanites, the young professionals, the ambitious and the relatively affluent, these are the people who set the tone.

Some are foreign-educated, have foreign friends, know about the West and think that it's high time we wised up about China. What's more, they think that this process of mutual learning is happening, and that the Olympics are an inevitable part of it. Never mind the national propaganda, it's the educational quality of the Games that matters.

Take a walk downtown. It's full of sharp-suited yuppies, smart young businesswomen, young girls in cut-off jeans and crop tops. And it doesn't even come as a surprise.

“The first question I was asked when I went to America was, ‘Is it true you eat cats in China?'” one said. "The second was, is it true you find dead babies all over the beaches, because of the one-child policy?'”

The Games have forced the West to take a slightly less fanciful view of China. The young Chinese see them as a great thing for precisely this reason - the Olympics have forced us to see the real China.

Beijingers were overjoyed when their city was awarded the Games. But they have been through seven years of irritation and disruption since then. Living in Beijing became difficult; like every authoritarian organisation, the Chinese Government has no problem with messing people about. There was a certain amount of disgruntlement.

But many Beijingers had a change of heart when the opening ceremony unwound. There was a sudden sense of being part of history, part of a continuum, from the lit-up scroll and the romantic depictions of China past, to the modern country that produced such a stadium, and was about to stage so colossal an event.

For the first time in 3,000 years of recorded history, Beijing was the centre of the Universe: and all eyes on Earth looked towards it.

There was sudden sense of the power of the Games. And more than anything, it is a power for change. Don't think that these urbanites are innocents or government dupes.

There are internet controls in China, but these people dance rings around them. You can't Google Tibet, Darfur, Falun Gong or Amnesty in the normal course of things, but there are other ways for the smart and computer-literate. They download files in text via sites designed for places with low bandwidth. The thing about controlling the internet is that you can't. It is too vast, and for young people brought up on computers, dodging restrictions is, almost literally, child's play. These people are clued up.

But Beijingers have changed as a result of the Games. For educated Beijingers, the changes are something of a relief. I lived in Hong Kong for four years, and lived them all to the background music of hawking and spitting. I have heard just two gobbers in three weeks. Something has changed.

It began as a television campaign, but it has worked because in Beijing they genuinely want foreigners to be impressed. Chinese men have ceased to strip to the waist at the least hint of discomfort, to the great relief of many in crowded restaurants. The initial suggestion came from the Government, but people took it on because they couldn't bear the idea of all these foreigners thinking China was a backward and stinking place.

Beijingers want us to like them. That is the most obvious thing about being here for the Games. This impression comes most obviously from the hordes of volunteers, most of them students. They are all still working hard and still smiling incessantly, even though the novelty has worn off. Again, they are doing this not because they have been told to, but because they want to.

There is a changing relationship between foreigners and Chinese. Foreigners once had a scarcity value in Beijing. There was a tendency to subservience from the Chinese, and an equal and opposite tendency of foreigners to take advantage. Cool Beijingers see that as a thing of the past. Beijing is full of foreigners, and nobody turns a head at tall, white, bearded, scruffy strangers.

More importantly, for the Chinese at least, the notion of awe and discomfort has gone. This has been happening over the years, but is something that the Games have emphatically reinforced. Beijing is becoming more cosmopolitan by the day and Beijingers are increasingly comfortable with that.

The Government set the great changes going when it opened China up to foreign investment in the late 1970s. It's a bit like weightlifting. In competition, you can only increase the weight on the bar. There is no going back. The process inevitably goes beyond control. With foreign money come foreign ideas, attitudes, different orthodoxies.

“We know bigger changes will come, that democracy will come. But we are patient.”

Patient unless the Government makes a mess of the economy. The boom can only keep booming if the momentum of change is maintained. True, these aren't thoughts that you put up posters about or set your name to, but many share them.

I suggested that the attitude of young educated people in Beijing to their Government was like young people still living with their parents, viewing them with a weary tolerance so long as they are allowed a great deal of their own way.

“That's it. Just like that.”

The Olympic Games are both a symptom and a way of accelerating the pace of change. That may not be what the Government had in mind when Beijing bid for the Games, but that, young Beijingers believe, is emphatically what they've got.

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