the complete lack of agency you seem to believe the people 
  that actually live in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, etc had 
  in deciding to revolt in the first place. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/21/barack-obama-ara...

  Egypt's revolution provided the first hurdle. Obama was 
  criticised for backing stability as the drama of Tahrir 
  Square unfolded. But on 1 February came his call for 
  Mubarak to step down "now". As the New York Times wrote: 
  "Obama upended three decades of American relations with its 
  most stalwart ally in the Arab world, putting the weight of 
  the United States squarely on the side of the Arab street."

As for this:

  look back through history. Nation building by rebel proxy 
  does not work 

Nation building doesn't work. Revolution by rebel proxy sure does. Governments don't overthrow themselves. As for history, the American Revolution succeeded because the French were pumping in money. The Vietnamese beat off the Americans because they had the Chinese and Soviets in their corner. The Afghans repelled the USSR with the help of the US and the Stinger missile. You will be hard pressed to find a revolution that won or even began without the intervention of foreign powers; where are the armaments coming from in the first place? The record shows that the Arab Spring was caused by US training, funding, armaments, and media support.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/world/15aid.html?pagewante...

  “We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” said 
  Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that 
  ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who 
  attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly 
  helped during the revolution.”

  At one time the United States financed political reform 
  groups by channeling money through the Egyptian government. 
  But in 2005, under a Bush administration initiative, local 
  groups were given direct grants, much to the chagrin of 
  Egyptian officials.

  The Egyptian government even appealed to groups like 
  Freedom House to stop working with local political 
  activists and human rights groups.

  “They were constantly saying: ‘Why are you working with 
  those groups, they are nothing. All they have are slogans,’ 
  ” said Sherif Mansour, an Egyptian activist and a senior 
  program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at 
  Freedom House.

  When their appeals to the United States government failed, 
  the Egyptian authorities reacted by restricting the 
  activities of the American nonprofit organizations.

  In the face of government opposition, some groups moved 
  their training sessions to friendlier countries like Jordan 
  or Morocco. They also sent activists to the United States 
  for training.

Further documentation on this topic is not hard to find. But feel free to minimize the explicit, acknowledged support of the most powerful country in the world for violent democratic revolution in favor of local "agency". As for whether this article on the #2 leader in China was printed at random, The New York Times has a track record of coordinating with the US government:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html...

  The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold 
  information about Mr. Davis's ties to the agency at the 
  request of the Obama administration, which argued that 
  disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. 
  Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some 
  aspects of Mr. Davis's work with the C.I.A. On Monday,  
  American officials lifted their request to withhold 
  publication, though George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, 
  declined any further comment.

http://www.salon.com/2011/02/21/nyt_16/

  It's one thing for a newspaper to withhold information 
  because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. 
  But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public 
  statements that were misleading in the extreme -- Obama's 
  calling Davis "our diplomat in Pakistan" -- while the NYT 
  deliberately concealed facts undermining those government 
  claims because government officials told them to do so. 
  That's called being an active enabler of government 
  propaganda. ...

  Following the dictates of the U.S. Government for what they 
  can and cannot publish is, of course, anything but new for 
  the New York Times. In his lengthy recent article on 
  WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, NYT Executive Editor Bill 
  Keller tried to show how independent his newspaper is by 
  boasting that they published their story of the Bush NSA 
  program even though he has "vivid memories of sitting in 
  the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to 
  persuade [him] and the paper's publisher to withhold the 
  eavesdropping story"; Keller neglected to mention that the 
  paper learned about the illegal program in mid-2004, but 
  followed Bush's orders to conceal it from the public for 
  over a year -- until after Bush was safely re-elected.

In other words, whether under Bush or Obama, the NYT has an acknowledged track record of coordinating with the US government on stories that could result in international incidents. A hit piece on one of the top people in the Chinese government might not have been done at the State Department's request, but it certainly would not have been published over the State Department's objection. The fact that its effect was to sow discontent with China's leadership is not unnoticed by anyone skeptical of US-exported democratic revolution.