While television sets in Hong Kong blaze with images of the pro-democracy protests that have paralysed the central business district since Sunday, citizens in mainland China have been getting a very different story: that a few thousand people gathered in a local park to celebrate the Chinese government.

On Sunday night, tens of thousands of protesters throughout Hong Kong faced down teargas and baton charges, but the state-controlled broadcaster Dragon TV did not show these images. Instead, it cheerfully announced that 28 civil society groups had spent the weekend in Tamar Park voicing support for the central government’s decisions on the region’s political future.

The broadcast showed a crowd of people waving Chinese flags to celebrate the upcoming 65th anniversary of country-wide Communist party rule. “We all hope Hong Kong can be prosperous and stable,” said a young man wearing glasses and a red polo shirt. “I think the National People’s Congress’s decision can bring us a step closer to fulfilling our requirement for universal suffrage.”

Protesters are furious at Beijing’s framework for the city’s next major election, in 2017, calling it “fake democracy”. Although central authorities say they will grant the region’s seven million people the ability to choose their next top official, the framework will only allow two or three pro-Beijing candidates to run.

Mainland authorities have severely restricted the spread of information about the protests. Censors completely blocked the photo-sharing service Instagram after it was flooded with pictures of unrest. On major social networking sites, pro-democracy posts are vanishing soon after they appear.

Searches for “Occupy Central” and “Hong Kong protest” on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog, yielded only irrelevant photos and links to state media reports. Searches for “Hong Kong” brought up mainly shopping tips and restaurant reviews.

Experts say that managing domestic opinion about the unrest has become a top priority for top party leaders, who fear that the spread of pro-democratic sentiment on the mainland could loosen the party’s grip on power.

“The Communist party is very clear that if the general election were to indeed happen in Hong Kong, people from many places in the mainland would want the same thing,” said Hu Jia, a prominent activist in Beijing. “What Hong Kongers have been doing – the student strike, public voting, protesting, and occupying the central city – could definitely inspire a lot of people in China.”

He added: “As for the censorship, it’s all because the Hong Kong issue could have a huge impact on the mainland. Yesterday I received hundreds of complaints from people on Twitter saying their Weibo accounts had been either blocked or deleted, most because they talked about the Hong Kong issue.”

China’s state media has universally condemned the movement as an illegal protest by a small minority of extremists.

“Hong Kong people’s motherland is the only one that will truly listen to Hong Kong’s voice, and Hong Kong people’s compatriots on the mainland are the only ones that will prioritise Hong Kong people’s concerns and demands,” the Communist party mouthpiece People’s Daily said in a Monday afternoon commentary. “Nobody cares about more about Hong Kong’s future than the Chinese people, and no government wants stability and prosperity for Hong Kong more than the Chinese government.”

It continued: “People are very pleased to see that the mainstream public opinion in Hong Kong supports and welcomes the decisions made by the central government.”

On Monday, the nationalist tabloid Global Times took a stronger position, calling the protesters doomed.

“As Chinese mainlanders, we feel sorrow over the chaos in Hong Kong on Sunday. Radical opposition forces in Hong Kong should be blamed,” it said in an editorial. “The radical activists are doomed. Opposition groups know well it’s impossible to alter the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on Hong Kong’s political reform plan.”