Over the past decade, Turkey and Brazil have been widely celebrated as star economic performers -- emerging markets with increasing influence on the international stage. Yet, over the past three months, both countries have been paralyzed by massive demonstrations expressing deep discontent with their governments' performance. What is going on here, and will more countries experience similar upheavals?

在过去的10年中，新兴市场在国际舞台上的影响力越来越大，其中土耳其和巴西被公认为是经济高速发展国家中的翘楚。然而，在过去的三个月中，这两个国家爆发了大规模的示威游行，人们借此宣泄了对政府表现的不满。究竟发生了什么？会不会有更多的国家遭遇类似的动荡呢？

The theme that connects recent events in Turkey and Brazil to each other, as well as to the 2011 Arab Spring and continuing protests in China, is the rise of a new global middle class. Everywhere it has emerged, a modern middle class causes political ferment, but only rarely has it been able, on its own, to bring about lasting political change. Nothing we have seen lately in the streets of Istanbul or Rio de Janeiro suggests that these cases will be an exception.

土耳其和巴西最近发生的示威游行，以及2011年的“阿拉伯之春”和中国发生的一系列抗议，都有一个共同的主题──新一代中产阶级的全球性崛起。现代中产阶级自出现以来就常常掀起政治巨浪。就以往的历史来看，中产阶级很少能够依靠本阶层的力量，带来持久的政治变革。最近发生在伊斯坦布尔和里约热内卢大街小巷上的游行，也不会是一个例外。

In Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income. They are technology-savvy and use social media like Facebook and Twitter to broadcast information and organize demonstrations. Even when they live in countries that hold regular democratic elections, they feel alienated from the ruling political elite.

同之前的突尼斯和埃及一样，发生在土耳其和巴西的政治抗议已经不是由贫困阶级领导了，取而代之的是教育水平和收入水平都高于平均程度的年轻一代。他们精通技术，使用Facebook和推特(Twitter)等社交媒体去传播信息，并组织示威游行。虽然他们居住的国家定期举行民主选举，这群年轻人还是觉得自己和执政的精英阶层十分疏远。

In the case of Turkey, they object to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's development-at-all-cost policies and authoritarian manner. In Brazil, they object to an entrenched and highly corrupt political elite that has showcased glamour projects like the World Cup and Rio Olympics while failing to provide basic services like health and education to the general public. For them, it is not enough that Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, was herself a left-wing activist jailed by the military regime during the 1970s and leader of the progressive Brazilian Workers Party. In their eyes, that party itself has been sucked into the maw of the corrupt 'system,' as revealed by a recent vote-buying scandal, and is now part of the problem of ineffective and unresponsive government.

就土耳其而言，他们反对土耳其总理雷杰普•塔伊普•埃尔多安(Recep Tayyip Erdogan)不惜一切成本的发展政策和独裁方式。而在巴西，他们反对的是统治阶层根深蒂固的腐败，以及无法向公众提供诸如健康和教育等基本服务、反而热衷于举办世界杯和里约奥运会等浮夸项目以展示其执政魅力的行为。巴西总统罗塞夫(Dilma Rousseff)曾是一名左翼活动家，也是激进派巴西工人党(Brazilian Workers Party)的领导人。20世纪70年代，罗塞芙曾受当时军政府的迫害而入狱。如今她的当选仍然无法满足当下的中产阶级。特别是随着最近贿选丑闻的揭发，在中产阶级眼里，巴西工人党本身已经成为了“贪腐系统”的一部分，体现了政府的执政能力不足和反应迟钝。

The business world has been buzzing about the rising 'global middle class' for at least a decade. A 2008 Goldman Sachs report defined this group as those with incomes between $6,000 and $30,000 a year and predicted that it would grow by some two billion people by 2030. A 2012 report by the European Union Institute for Security Studies, using a broader definition of middle class, predicted that the number of people in that category would grow from 1.8 billion in 2009 to 3.2 billion in 2020 and 4.9 billion in 2030 (out of a projected global population of 8.3 billion). The bulk of this growth will occur in Asia, particularly China and India. But every region of the world will participate in the trend, including Africa, which the African Development Bank estimates already has a middle class of more than 300 million people.

业界关于崛起中的“全球中产阶级”的讨论至少有10年了。2008年，高盛(Goldman Sachs)的一份报告将这个阶级定义为年收入在6,000到30,000美元间的人群，并预计到2030年，这个阶层的人数会增长约20亿。欧盟安全研究所(European Union Institute for Security Studies)在2012年发布的一份报告中使用了更为广泛的中产阶级定义，并预测该阶层人数会由2009年的18亿增长到2020年的32亿，再增长到2030年的49亿（那个时候全球人口预计将达83亿）。中产阶级增长的主力军将是亚洲国家，特别是中国和印度。但全球其他地区也会紧随这个趋势，包括非洲。目前，据非洲发展银行(African Development Bank)估计，整个非洲已经有超过三亿的中产阶级人群。

Corporations are salivating at the prospect of this emerging middle class because it represents a vast pool of new consumers. Economists and business analysts tend to define middle-class status simply in monetary terms, labeling people as middle class if they fall within the middle of the income distribution for their countries, or else surpass some absolute level of consumption that raises a family above the subsistence level of the poor.

企业对新兴中产阶级所能带来的前景垂涎欲滴，因为他们代表了巨大的新兴消费人群。经济学家和商业分析家试图简单地通过收入分配来定义中产阶级。他们认为：如果收入处于他们所在国家的中等水平，或者其绝对消费值高于赖以维持生计的穷困生活水平，这部分人就可以被定义为中产阶级。

But middle-class status is better defined by education, occupation and the ownership of assets, which are far more consequential in predicting political behavior. Any number of cross-national studies, including recent Pew surveys and data from the World Values Survey at the University of Michigan, show that higher education levels correlate with people's assigning a higher value to democracy, individual freedom and tolerance for alternative lifestyles. Middle-class people want not just security for their families but choices and opportunities for themselves. Those who have completed high school or have some years of university education are far more likely to be aware of events in other parts of the world and to be connected to people of a similar social class abroad through technology.

但用教育背景、从事职业和资本资产来界定中产阶级更为合理，这是因为以上三方面能更好地预测其潜在的政治行为。许多跨国研究，包括皮尤研究中心(Pew)近期的一些调研和密歇根大学(University of Michigan)世界价值观调查项目(World Values Survey)的数据显示：受教育水平越高，人们所要求的社会民主度和个人自由度就会越高，人们对生活方式多样化的追求也会随受教育水平而提高。中产阶级期望的不仅仅是家人的安全，还有更多属于自己的选择和机会。那些具有高中或大学教育背景的年轻阶层更容易通过科技来了解世界其它地方发生的事情，并与国外类似社会阶层的人士连接起来。

Families who have durable assets like a house or apartment have a much greater stake in politics, since these are things that the government could take away from them. Since the middle classes tend to be the ones who pay taxes, they have a direct interest in making government accountable. Most importantly, newly arrived members of the middle class are more likely to be spurred to action by what the late political scientist Samuel Huntington called 'the gap': that is, the failure of society to meet their rapidly rising expectations for economic and social advancement. While the poor struggle to survive from day to day, disappointed middle-class people are much more likely to engage in political activism to get their way.

拥有耐久性资产（如房子或公寓）的人，从事政治运动会有更大的风险，因为政府有权没收这些财产。由于中产阶级往往是纳税人的主体部分，一个可靠的政府对他们有着直接的利害关系。最重要的是，中产阶级的新晋成员更容易被已故政治学家塞缪尔•亨廷顿(Samuel Huntington)所说的“差距”(Gap)所刺激：经济和社会地位的提高使人们的期望值增长，而社会无法充分满足人们提升的期望值。当穷人们还在为生存而挣扎时，中产阶层更可能通过从事政治活动来表达他们的诉求。

This dynamic was evident in the Arab Spring, where regime-changing uprisings were led by tens of thousands of relatively well-educated young people. Both Tunisia and Egypt had produced large numbers of college graduates over the past generation. But the authoritarian governments of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak were classic crony-capitalist regimes, in which economic opportunities depended heavily on political connections. Neither country, in any event, had grown fast enough economically to provide jobs for ever-larger cohorts of young people. The result was political revolution.

“阿拉伯之春”就是这种动向的最好证明，这场推翻了政权的起义是由成千上万受过相对良好教育的年轻人带领的。过去十几年，突尼斯和埃及都培养了数量众多的大学毕业生。然而突尼斯总统宰因•阿比丁•本•阿里(Zine El Abidine Ben Ali)和埃及总统胡斯尼•穆巴拉克(Hosni Mubarak)的独裁政府却奉行着典型的裙带资本主义，经济机会在很大程度上取决于政治关系。在任何情况下，这种制度都不能给这两个国家带来经济的快速增长，也不能为越来越多的年轻人提供就业岗位。其最终结果就只能是一场政治革命。

None of this is a new phenomenon. The French, Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions were all led by discontented middle-class individuals, even if their ultimate course was later affected by peasants, workers and the poor. The 1848 'Springtime of Peoples' saw virtually the whole European continent erupt in revolution, a direct product of the European middle classes' growth over the previous decades.

这并不是一个新的现象。法国大革命、布尔什维克起义和中国革命都是由对当时政局不满的中产阶级人士领导的，虽然主力在后期变成了农民阶层、工人阶层等劳苦大众。1848年“人民的春天”运动(Springtime of Peoples)几乎让整个欧洲大陆陷入了革命中，这也正是欧洲中产阶级在之前的几10年中快速成长的直接产物。

While protests, uprisings and occasionally revolutions are typically led by newly arrived members of the middle class, the latter rarely succeed on their own in bringing about long-term political change. This is because the middle class seldom represents more than a minority of the society in developing countries and is itself internally divided. Unless they can form a coalition with other parts of society, their movements seldom produce enduring political change.

虽然这些抗议、起义和短暂的革命通常是由新晋的中产阶级成员领导，可他们很少能够凭借本阶层引领长期的政治变革。这是因为发展中国家的中产阶层通常只是少数，并且内部也常常拉帮结派。除非他们能和社会其他阶层形成联盟，不然其行动很少能引发持久的政治变革。

Thus the young protesters in Tunis or in Cairo's Tahrir Square, having brought about the fall of their respective dictators, failed to follow up by organizing political parties that were capable of contesting nationwide elections. Students in particular are clueless about how to reach out to peasants and the working class to create a broad political coalition. By contrast, the Islamist parties -- Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- had a social base in the rural population. Through years of political persecution, they had become adept at organizing their less-educated followers. The result was their triumph in the first elections held after the fall of the authoritarian regimes.

因此，突尼斯和开罗解放广场(Tahrir Square)上的年轻示威者能够打倒各自国家的独裁者，却不能够通过组织一个够资格参与全国选举的政党以持续跟进。学生阶层尤其不知道怎样团结农民和工人阶级以创造更为广泛的政治联盟。相比之下，伊斯兰政党──突尼斯的伊斯兰复兴党(Ennahda)和埃及的穆斯林兄弟会(Muslim Brotherhood)──却在农村地区有着广泛的群众基础。由于遭受多年的政治迫害，他们已经十分擅长组织那些教育程度较低的追随者。这就是为何在紧随独裁政权倒台后举行的第一次选举中，他们取得胜利的原因。

A similar fate potentially awaits the protesters in Turkey. Prime Minister Erdogan remains popular outside of the country's urban areas and has not hesitated to mobilize members of his own Justice and Development Party (AKP) to confront his opponents. Turkey's middle class, moreover, is itself divided. That country's remarkable economic growth over the past decade has been fueled in large measure by a new, pious and highly entrepreneurial middle class that has strongly supported Erdogan's AKP.

土耳其的抗议者们似乎正面临着相似的命运。总理埃尔多安在本国的非城镇地区依然保持着较高的受欢迎度，他还毫不迟疑地调动了自己的正义与发展党(AKP)成员去对付反对势力。此外，土耳其的中产阶级也分裂严重。该国在过去10年中经济发展显著，在很大程度上是由一个尽责的、具有高度进取精神的新的中产阶级群体所推动的，这个群体一直大力支持埃尔多安的正义与发展党。

This social group works hard and saves its money. It exhibits many of the same virtues that the sociologist Max Weber associated with Puritan Christianity in early modern Europe, which he claimed was the basis for capitalist development there. The urban protesters in Turkey, by contrast, remain more secular and connected to the modernist values of their peers in Europe and America. Not only does this group face tough repression from a prime minister with authoritarian instincts, it faces the same difficulties in forging linkages with other social classes that have bedeviled similar movements in Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

这个社会群体工作努力，注重节俭。它所具备的许多品德和社会学家马克斯•韦伯(Max Weber)所说的近代欧洲基督教清教徒的品德一致（韦伯认为基督教清教徒的品德是资本主义发展的基础）。相比之下，在土耳其城市里面的示威者们却更加世俗化，更崇尚欧美同龄人的现代主义价值观。他们不仅仅遭受着具有独裁本能的总理的强硬镇压，还面临着如何团结其他阶层的困难。正是因为缺乏同其他阶层的联系，俄罗斯、乌克兰和其它一些地方类似的运动都失败了。

The situation in Brazil is rather different. The protesters there will not face tough repression from President Rousseff's administration. Rather, the challenge will be avoiding co-optation over the long term by the system's entrenched and corrupt incumbents. Middle-class status does not mean that an individual will automatically support democracy or clean government. Indeed, a large part of Brazil's older middle class was employed by the state sector, where it was dependent on patronage politics and state control of the economy. Middle classes there, and in Asian countries like Thailand and China, have thrown their support behind authoritarian governments when it seemed like that was the best means of securing their economic futures.

巴西的情况则颇为不同，示威者不会面临罗塞芙总统政府的强硬镇压。相反，他们面临的挑战是如何从长远的角度避免被根深蒂固的腐败政权逐步侵蚀。身为中产阶级并不意味着每个人就会自动拥护民主或者支持廉洁的政府。事实上，巴西的旧中产阶级中有很大一部分受雇于国有企业，而国有企业的成功正是依赖于政策的偏袒和国家对经济的控制。巴西以及泰国和中国等亚洲国家的中产阶级，都向独裁政府抛出过橄榄枝──在情势显示这样是确保其稳定的现状不被动摇的最佳方法的时候。

Brazil's recent economic growth has produced a different and more entrepreneurial middle class rooted in the private sector. But this group could follow its economic self-interest in either of two directions. On the one hand, the entrepreneurial minority could serve as the basis of a middle-class coalition that seeks to reform the Brazilian political system as a whole, pushing to hold corrupt politicians accountable and to change the rules that make client-based politics possible. This is what happened in the U.S. during the Progressive Era, when a broad middle-class mobilization succeeded in rallying support for civil-service reform and an end to the 19th-century patronage system. Alternatively, members of the urban middle class could dissipate their energies in distractions like identity politics or get bought off individually by a system that offers great rewards to people who learn to play the insiders' game.

巴西近年来的经济增长催生了一个同原来的中产阶层不同、更多地植根于私营企业的中产阶级。这个阶层为了追求自身的经济利益，可能走上两条不同的道路。一条道路是，这些少数派企业家们可以构建一个中产阶级联盟，旨在彻底改革巴西的政治体系，消除政客间的腐败，推行责任制，改变传统的关系型政治(client-based politics)的游戏规则。这就好比美国的“进步时代”(Progressive Era)一样，广泛的中产阶级成功地获得了各方支援，促成了公务员制度改革(Civil-Service Reform)，并终结了19世纪盛行的政治分赃制 (Patronage System)。另一条道路则是，城市中产阶级的精力被一些政治手段消耗殆尽，例如大搞身份认同政治(Identity Politics)，或被那些精于游戏规则的政治家们以诱惑的回报给收买分化。

There is no guarantee that Brazil will follow the reformist path in the wake of the protests. Much will depend on leadership. President Rousseff has a tremendous opportunity to use the uprisings as an occasion to launch a much more ambitious systemic reform. Up to now she has been very cautious in how far she was willing to push against the old system, constrained by the limitations of her own party and political coalition. But just as the 1881 assassination of President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker became the occasion for wide-ranging clean-government reforms in the U.S., so too could Brazil use the occasion of the protests to shift onto a very different course today.

抗议浪潮过后，没有任何人能保证巴西一定可以走上改革之路。这在很大程度上取决于领导者的决策。罗塞芙总统正面临一个巨大的机遇，她可以顺势推出一个更雄心勃勃的系统性改革计划。到目前为止，由于所属政党和政治联盟的制约，她对究竟能在多大程度上推进旧体制改革一直十分谨慎。不过，正如1881年一位求职失败者刺杀美国总统詹姆斯•加菲尔德(James A. Garfield)从而引发了美国大规模廉政改革一样，今天的巴西也可以利用本次示威游行浪潮走上一条完全不同的轨道。

The global economic growth that has taken place since the 1970s -- with a quadrupling of global economic output -- has reshuffled the social deck around the world. The middle classes in the so-called 'emerging market' countries are larger, richer, better educated and more technologically connected than ever before.

自20世纪70年代以来，全球经济迅速发展，经济产出已经是上世纪70年代的四倍之多。经济的发展改组了世界各地的“社会甲板”。“新兴市场”国家的中产阶级数量比以往任何时候都要多，也更加富有，他们受到了更好的教育，也拥有更发达的科技。

This has huge implications for China, whose middle-class population now numbers in the hundreds of millions and constitutes perhaps a third of the total. These are the people who communicate by Sina Weibo -- the Chinese Twitter -- and have grown accustomed to exposing and complaining about the arrogance and duplicity of the government and Party elite. They want a freer society, though it is not clear they necessarily want one-person, one-vote democracy in the near term.

这对中国有着巨大的影响，数亿的中产阶级已经构成了中国总人口的约三分之一。这个阶层的人们通过新浪微博沟通，并逐渐形成了在微博上抱怨或揭露政府和执政党的傲慢与表里不一的习惯。他们期望一个更加自由的社会，尽管一人一票的民主制度在短期内对他们来说并非一定是个必要条件。

This group will come under particular stress in the coming decade as China struggles to move from middle- to high-income status. Economic growth rates have already started to slow over the past two years and will inevitably revert to a more modest level as the country's economy matures. The industrial job machine that the regime has created since 1978 will no longer serve the aspirations of this population. It is already the case that China produces some six million to seven million new college graduates each year, whose job prospects are dimmer than those of their working-class parents. If ever there was a threatening gap between rapidly rising expectations and a disappointing reality, it will emerge in China over the next few years, with vast implications for the country's stability.

随着中国正努力从中等收入国家向高收入国家迈进，中产阶级将会在未来10年内受到严峻的挑战。中国的经济增长率在过去两年已经开始放缓，随着国家经济的成熟，必将进一步恢复到一个较为温和的水平。自1978年以来的工业化生产已经无法再推动这个阶层的发展。目前，中国每年新增约600至700万大学毕业生，可他们的就业前景却比父母那一代的工薪阶层更加黯淡。如果说人们迅速增长的期望和令人失望的现实之间可能出现惊人的差距，那么它一定会出现在未来几年的中国。这对国家的稳定性有着极大的影响。

There, as in other parts of the developing world, the rise of a new middle class underlies the phenomenon described by Moises Naim of the Carnegie Endowment as the 'end of power.' The middle classes have been on the front lines of opposition to abuses of power, whether by authoritarian or democratic regimes. The challenge for them is to turn their protest movements into durable political change, expressed in the form of new institutions and policies. In Latin America, Chile has been a star performer with regard to economic growth and the effectiveness of its democratic political system. Nonetheless, recent years have seen an explosion of protests by high-school students who have pointed to the failings of the country's public education system.

来自卡内基国际和平基金会(Carnegie Endowment)的莫伊塞斯•纳伊姆(Moises Naim)将其它发展中国家正在崛起的新兴中产阶级描述为“权力的终结者”。无论是专制政权还是民主政权，中产阶级始终站在反对滥用权力的第一线上。他们面临的挑战是如何把示威抗议转变成持久的政治变革、如何树立国家组织机构的新风貌以及实施全新的政治决策。在拉丁美洲，就经济增长速度和民主政治制度的有效性而言，智利一直是杰出代表。然而，近年来智利也爆发了诸多由高中生发起的抗议，指责国家公共教育系统的失败。

The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels, simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls. The technologically empowered middle class will be highly demanding of their politicians across the board.

新的中产阶级不仅是独裁政权或新兴民主国家所面临的挑战。已经建立了民主制度的国家也不应该认为：只要拥有选举权和在民意调查中有良好表现的领导人，就可以高枕无忧。精通技术的中产阶级将对统治他们的政治家有更高的要求。

The U.S. and Europe are experiencing sluggish growth and persistently high unemployment, which for young people in countries like Spain reaches 50%. In the rich world, the older generation also has failed the young by bequeathing them crushing debts. No politician in the U.S. or Europe should look down complacently on the events unfolding in the streets of Istanbul and Sao Paulo. It would be a grave mistake to think, 'It can't happen here.'

美国和欧洲眼下经济增长乏力，失业率持续走高，西班牙的年轻人失业率更是达到惊人的50%。在富裕国家，上一代也不得不把累积的债务过继给下一代。对于伊斯坦布尔和圣保罗街头上发生的事件，没有任何一位美国或欧洲的政治家可以袖手旁观、洋洋得意。如果他们以为“这不可能在我们国家发生”，那就大错特错了。