If you peer hard enough through the pall of smog that squats over this city, you can sight glory and smell triumph. Not just the wonder of Olympic athletes in victory, but also a wild celebration of the human spirit. The smog itself tells us about all the astonishing things that humanity is capable of achieving. It is utterly appropriate that the day before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008 should pass, as all other days this week have passed, in a great and glorious cloud of murk.

We had a blue-sky day on Sunday, then the sun went missing. I had a three-second sighting of it a couple of days back, but by God, you had to be quick. If you hadn't seen it for a while, you wouldn't have recognised it. But most of my time here has been spent in a strange silver-grey dome about half a mile across. It's as if the world beyond doesn't exist.

The Chinese say it's just a foggy day in Beijing town. Foreign sensation-seekers say it is lethal smog. And they are both right, very high humidity and a cloud ceiling of about zero feet do not do much to make the city look good, but the unshifting cloud, filled with the perpetual paranoid buzz of helicopters, is not made of water vapour alone.

The BBC has been taking informal readings and the other day came up with a figure of 191 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic metre of air. We are all experts now, so I can tell you that the particulate matter in question mostly comes from the emission of fossil fuels. The World Health Organisation recommends a target of 50, and 150 as an interim target for developing nations. London is about 21. Chinese readings of the Beijing air are significantly lower and anyway, these measurements can vary wildly.

But clearly we are in sub-optimal conditions for the start of the greatest sporting event on earth. All those famous and draconian measures that the Chinese Government has taken have failed to give us a single blue-sky day in the week leading up to the Games. Traffic has been halved - odd and even numberplates on alternating days - and factories, construction sites, mines and chemical plants have been given an enforced holiday. And still I can't see from one end of the Olympic Park to the other.

Now, we all know that pollution is a bad thing, but it doesn't happen through malice. And here, it has come about because of a wild uplifting surge of the human spirit. Modern China is a phenomenon. It is the result not of government but of individual initiative. The freeing of the native entrepreneurial spirit that began before the handing back of Hong Kong has resulted in an explosion of creativity.

The people have sought to do in a decade what other nations have done over the course of centuries. It has been a wild and reckless charge headlong into the modern world. It has been glorious, it has been spectacular, it is a tribute to the spirit and the ability of humanity in general and the Chinese in particular.

Now it is time to count the cost, and the world looks at the great things China has done and sucks its teeth.

It's unfair, and yet it's not. In its incontinent hurry to become as modern as the developed world, China has copied all the mistakes that the developed world has already made. China has assumed that there is only one route that takes you to where the developed world is now; being in too much of a hurry to notice that the developed world is now spending large sums of money to right the things that went wrong as a result of unthinking development.

Restoration ecology, replanting, re-greening - a belated realisation that humanity also requires softness and green growth; the developed world is spending a fortune putting the toothpaste back into the tube, while China has the tube on the floor and is stamping with all its might.

Any suggestion that China has got it wrong is routinely dismissed as interference, not to say impertinence. But now, as the Games begin, a cloud of doubt hangs over Beijing, asking the most awkward questions. The mind-boggling brilliance of the Chinese economic revolution is something that - in terms of pure achievement - can only leave the observer lost in the wonder of it all.

Could any other people have achieved so much, and so fast? But all the same, you can't help but wish that they'd done it slightly differently. Perhaps they could have asked the developed world what it most regretted about the process of development. And perhaps these Games will stand as a lesson to us all, that economic development is not the only thing in life that matters. But for China, as for the developed world, such a realisation is a little on the late side.

Calmer chameleons fool no one

The people I have heard speak in the week before the Games have reached a plateau of sanity and enlightenment so lofty that you can only assume they have been following the way of the Tao all their lives. Every competitor is full of grace and balance: focused but at the same time relaxed; relishing the prospect ahead, yet not willing the time away too hard; thrilled by the opportunity to be out there and doing it, yet without being touched by dread.

Every contender is a certainty, every shoo-in has no concerns about failure. The Brits will hit their targets with effortless ease and Michael Phelps has already beaten Mark Spitz's record, or if not, he has the whole thing in perfect perspective. There is a second cloud that hangs over Beijing, and it is a cloud of serenity. Unlike the other cloud, it casts no shadow.

Everyone basks under the cloud of serenity, but everyone is eaten up with turbulence and terror. And everybody fails to convert that face to reality. Today, at last, the action starts and we will see these people as they really are. But in the meantime, press conferences make Lao Tzus of us all.

Fu the bearer of eternal flame

My preferred scenario for the opening ceremony was to have the great Fu Mingxia dive 300 feet from the roof with a flaming torch in her hand to ignite the Olympic flame. You will remember Fu: she was the 13-year-old who won the ten-metre platform diving gold in the Barcelona Games in 1992 with the great cityscape behind her. After that, the minimum age was shifted up to 14, to give the rest a chance.

She came back a couple of stone heavier in Atlanta four years later, won the platform and then the three-metre, for she now had the muscle power to make the springboard ping. Then she retired and went to college and was content until some asked: “Were you really an Olympic athlete?” Fu was mortified.

So, just to show, she got back in shape and won the springboard again in Sydney. Before, she had done it because she was told to; now she was doing it because she bloody well chose to.

If you want a suitably equivocal symbol of China - a country that is changing faster than its rulers can understand - the great Fu will do the job very nicely.