[kbenson]

I'm not sure I necessarily buy that explanation either, but I don't know enough of the facts of this particular story to know where it falls down or is supported.

On the other hand, we don't really know what the Chinese knew, or thought they knew, about Google and how it functioned WRT government surveillance. If they had reason to believe that Google would be cooperating with authorities and would have infrastructure in place to monitor email accounts that they could look for and identify if it was monitoring the accounts they were looking for, then this explanation makes a bit more sense.