Honestly, it may not even be that elaborate. China intelligence could just be putting bounties out for information on American Navy worship operations and leaving it up to the cargo captains to buy their own drones and get creative about using them.

And from China's point of view, this is almost certainly tit for tat. As far as they're concerned, the US has allowed one of its private corporations to deploy a space surveillance network. Using drones to observe individual Navy vessels is small potatoes relative to what China assumes the American intelligence edifice can gather from Starlink.