The Chinese government might not be trying to hack your Google Mail account but maybe your ex has. The most common security violation is a significant other or an ex hacking into, logging into without authorization, into a email account. Google Mail has a small feature that allows you to check the activity for your GMail account to see if there are unauthorized logins.
Once you have logged into GMail, scroll all they way to the bottom, between the Google copyright and the available storage capacity you will see a line that reads like the following: Last account activity: 33 minutes ago on this computer. Details.
Clicking on the Details link will popup a window that shows you activity history for your GMail account. The Details page will list the IP address of each time you account was accessed, the date/time of each login, it will show the number of logins from the current session.
You will get a different session each time you login, for example when you use a different computer, etc. Since you can track the date/time, IP address, and session for each login you should be able to verify the activity of your GMail account. This should be enough information for you to spot irregular activity.
From the account activity Details page you can log out from all sessions by clicking the “Sign out all other sessions” button. This will log out all sessions from all computers, for example if you forgot to logout from your schools computer, etc. Signing out from a session would require users to sign back in with your username and password. If you spot irregular activity in your mail account, you should consider changing your password.
If you find mysterious IP addresses in you account activity you can Google for any number of web sites that can track an location to your IP address. These services are not accurate to the city, it might report a city 20 miles away from the actual location but location to IP address services might provide additional hints to track down the location of where your account was accessed.
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