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.