Holy shit I was just talking to my Chinese ex-girlfriend who lives in China about this briefly, exactly what this article is saying is happening is exactly how she responded when talking about Hong Kong. She brought the topic of HK up and I asked her what her thoughts about the protesters were, one sec let me just copy and paste her response, her English isn’t the best so it may be a little hard to understand:

“Actually I can understand the protestors，but there is a but. There is no excuse for them to making violence or no peace. That is the problem. If you don't agree with any decide or result with the mainland, ok, I think the government will deal with it. You can't decide any of it. Hongkong is a free place, you can say anything you want. Ok, no problem, you can have your opinion, you can submit your idea to Hongkong government. But I don't think they are real Hongkong people who love Hongkong.”

She genuinely doesn’t know about what’s really going on, if she’s fed misinformation non-stop that the protestors are the ones being violent and unreasonable then it’s understandable why she thinks this way. But there’s no doubt that mainland citizens are being heavily misinformed.