[fuoqi]

For tracking of military ships it's much better to use radar imaging satellites (e.g. see [0]). They can cover a larger area, see ships really well, and almost not affected by weather.

I will not be surprised if China has a constellation of such satellites to track US carriers and it's why Pentagon keeps them relatively far from Iran, since it's likely that China confidentially shares targeting information with them.

[0]: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

[phire]

China has Huanjing [0], which is officially for "environmental monitoring", but almost certainly has enough resolution to track large ships (at least the later versions, apparently the early versions had poor resolution)

And even if they didn't, Russia have Kondor, [1] which is explicitly military, and we know they have been sharing data with Iran.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanjing_(satellite) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondor_(satellite)