Abstract: The variations of atmospheric compositions (ACs) can interfere in the interaction between the atmosphere and the Earth’s other spheres.Satellite remote sensing plays a unique role in monitoring ACs by providing a matchless global perspective.Chinese remote sensing missions, including Chinese meteorological satellite mission namely Fengyun (FY) Satellite Programs, have been ongoing since 1970s.Twenty years after the first Fengyun satellite in 1988, the successful launch of FY-3A mission in 2008 marked a breakthrough of Chinese operational satellite missions for ACs monitoring.Since then, several operational satellite missions and pathfinders for ACs monitoring have been implemented, which have greatly promoted the research and application of satellite remote sensing for the measurement of aerosol particles, trace gases, and greenhouse gases (GHG).Among them, imagers including the moderate resolution ones onboard operational polar FY-3 and high-temporal ones onboard operational geostationary FY-4 missions, as well as the directional polarization imagers onboard Gaofen-5 (GF-5) series and Atmosphere Environment Monitoring Satellite (AEMS), provide aerosol observation data with high spatial coverage and high temporal resolution, respectively.A variety of trace gases can also be monitored by the nadir spectrographs onboard the FY-3 series and GF-5 series and AEMS.In addition, hyper-spectrometers onboard FY-3 series, GF-5 series, AEMS and pathfinder mission TANSat are used to map the global distribution of GHG, providing various products such as column concentration of carbon dioxide.Meanwhile, in-situ calibration and validation have made significant progress since the late 1990s, offering insight into the consistency of satellite and ground observations across China.Launched in April 2022, AEMS is the first mission for ACs monitoring that is equipped with an active lidar for carbon dioxide and aerosol monitoring.This novel observation will be able to improve the accuracy of space-borne observations on carbon dioxide and aerosol particles and better serve the national strategical goal of “carbon dioxide peaking and carbon neutrality”.