Google returns an estimate of the number of hits, and what's more an estimate that can be wildly off.

Also, the days of Google only returning results containing all of your search terms are about 10 years in the past - so a search (without quotes) for "a b c" will return hits with some combination of those terms, but not necessarily all of them. ie, your 2.3 hits includes "government hacking" (without Chinese), "Chinese Government" (without hacking), etc.