There is a framed picture above my desk. It shows a beautiful bluey-greeny world encircled by children bearing flowers. One of them is in fact a panda, and he's smiling and waving. I almost feel like waving back. A label tells me that my picture is “Compliment the Huiyan Media Village”.

I don't wish to be ungrateful, but it may not make the journey home to Suffolk. For you will gather that I have already reached a place where such images must be believed in. Why? And is the place in question Olympia, the home of wherever the Olympic Games happens to be? Or is it the People's Republic of China?

For the two places have something in common. Both feel a need for certain comforting fictions: namely, that the world they have created is a good world and that everybody involved in it is happy. Since this is manifestly not the case, a further fiction is required: that the only possible danger to happiness is people who are wrong, people such as Americans or drugs users, Tibetan separatists or corrupt officials.

It is the vanity of both the Olympic organisation and China: to maintain the fiction that we are all living happily ever after; to insist that now is precisely what our story was for. And it really doesn't fool anybody; it just suits the organisations in question to hold up the pretence.

China is not a place of achieved perfection, any more than it is a place of unrestrained oppression. It is a country going through vast, high-speed traumatic changes; intellectual and political changes are lagging behind the brutal pace of economic advancement, but change is what is going on here - and much of the process is out of control.

The changes are marvellously told in Zhu Wen's uncompromisingly titled book of short stories, I Love Dollars. It reminded me a little of James Joyce's Dubliners in its portrayal of a society ill at ease and caught between two times. The title story concludes: “All I'd done, inside the vacuum that had been the last 24 hours, was to take to its logical conclusion the most logical thing you can do with a 34-year-old woman.” And no, they didn't seem to be living happily ever after, do they?

But this is not to say that Chinese society is wrong, just that human life is hard and that there are times when everything is out of joint. That is true of our own society, no doubt it was true in Mayan or Pharaonic civilisations. In the West, we are used to that idea. We mostly accept rampant individuality, chaos, a million different opinions, a million ways of pursuing happiness, a million more of finding unhappiness. Life is not simple and lovely, and the British Government is not going to make it so, nor does any British Government seriously try and pretend to.

It is different in China, where such fictions must still be upheld, even in a dizzyingly changing universe - that is perhaps the fundamental difference between our two nations. And it is odd to note that similar fictions are upheld in the Olympic Movement, in which we are encouraged to believe that all nations and all competitors are here to compete for nothing but love and peace and harmony ... and then we will be furious when the next drugs bust comes along, or the next vulgar patriotic excess.

There is no point in believing any of these fictions. They do not help us to understand the world; all they do is make people unhappy when they turn out to be wrong. The truth is that life in China, like life in Britain, is full of people striving for greatness, fighting despair, some without scruple, some with a glorious generosity, and it is also full of far more people seeking only to rub along and reach at least a few personal satisfactions.

And the Olympic Games is just the same, whether they are held in Beijing or London, Athens, Atlanta or Sydney. The Games is full of good things and full of bad things, because it represents humanity. Not an idealised, fictionalised version of humanity, but all of it, the real thing, in all its mess and chaos and corruption and glory and beauty.

And that's why I love the Games: not for the flower-clutching children, but because it brings us humanity, in nobility and corruption, in triumph and disaster, in ugliness and in beauty, in the most vivid possible way.

Neither the British nor the Chinese people, nor the billions of us who will be involved in the Olympics Games, are living happily ever after. We are all in the middle of our stories, not the end. We are the story, and I look forward to telling it again and again over the next three weeks.

People make places come alive

A stroll around the Olympic Complex to examine the local architecture. It's not much, really, just another magnificent (all stadiums are magnificent) stadium that looks like a bowl of crispy noodles and a sort of plasticky thing that's apparently the Aquatic Cube. Architects make these things because they can. Round the outside, a procession of people enjoying the day off by taking photographs of each other with the Stade de Noodle in the background.

Inside the complex, a lot of empty space and heat. Well, at least the damn thing is finished; in Athens, I was tripping over builders' junk at the closing ceremony. But the place I looked at yesterday was dead; it will not come alive until Friday, when the people come. It's nice for a building to look nice, but what matters is how it functions as a place for human beings.

Until people get in them and claim them for their own, stadiums are just an expression of national ambition. A sports stadium without sport is a meaningless thing. The truth of sport is not in the architecture, but in the action. The bigger the event, the truer that is.

Beijing does service with a smile

At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 it took me four hours to collect my accreditation; but then I was lucky. In Athens four years ago, it took me two hours to get out of the airport and half an hour to find my accommodation in the media village from the place where the bus dropped me. I stepped from the plane in Beijing at 11.20am, ten minutes later I was accredited, five minutes later I had my bags, five more and I was on a media bus, within the hour I was in my room overlooking the Stade de Noodle.

And I was already the receiver of a thousand smiles, although the real miracle was that the would-be helpful young people actually knew how to do the actual helping.

And when I think of those bloody rednecks manning the gates in Atlanta, genuinely believing that we were all so damn lucky to be in the You Ess Ay, and why didn't we stop complaining that the buses had failed and fall on our knees with thanks?

But this place wants to be loved. The instruction to be lovable comes from above, but the action comes from the heart. Already I feel that these Games are something to do with the commitment of at least a billion people.