Freedom of speech?? Where?

Few days after Google announced to leave Chinese market, few journalists who based on Western countries, saying that their yahoo email account has been hacked. And some of them reported that they've been locked out of their account.
Maybe it is a coincident that those journalists' accounts happen to be hacked right after Google saying that it's going to leave and the criticism of China being ridiculously censoring their Internet has aroused. Or is it?
I came from a country that freedom of speech seems to be a bit over implemented and it's really hard for me to imagine the closeness and censorship that China has. When I am reading this news, question popped out to me. What's the reaction when Chinese international students read this? Which side will they take? Maybe, they will be thinking that, Oh here it comes again. Or, maybe they will respond that, this is just another Western journalism revealing the dark side of our country. China uses lots of different ways to censor the content on the internet; maybe hacking into those accounts of journalists is another way to shut them up before it needs to filter the content to its public.