CBERS-2B was a 1,450-kilogram (3,200 lb) spacecraft built by the China Academy of Space Technology and based on the Phoenix-Eye 1 satellite bus. The spacecraft was powered by a single solar array, which provided 1,100 watts of electricity for the satellite's systems.

The instrument suite aboard the CBERS-2B spacecraft consisted of three systems: the Wide Field Imager (WFI) produced visible-light to near-infrared images with a resolution of 260 metres (850 ft) and a swath width of 890 kilometres (550 mi); a high-resolution CCD camera was used for multispectral imaging at a resolution of 20 metres (66 ft) with a swath width of 113 kilometres (70 mi); the third instrument, the High-Resolution Camera (HRC) was a panchromatic imager with a resolution of 2.7 metres (8 ft 10 in) and a swath width of 27 kilometres (17 mi). HRC replaced the lower-resolution Infrared Multispectral Scanner instrument flown on earlier CBERS satellites.