China Southern to resume Guangzhou–Delhi flights after six years
The carrier said services restart on 21 September, announced hours before Xi Jinping landed for the BRICS summit. It is the fourth India–China route to return this year.
China Southern Airlines will resume scheduled passenger services on the Guangzhou–New Delhi route from 21 September, the carrier announced on Saturday, ending a suspension that has lasted six years. Global Times reported the announcement.
It came hours before Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in New Delhi for the BRICS summit, and it is the fourth direct route between India and China to be restored this year.
What the airline said
China Southern said that once the Delhi service restarts, it will operate more than 100 weekly flights across its eight round-trip routes in South Asia. The Delhi route is therefore not a standalone restoration but part of a regional network the carrier is rebuilding.
The relaunch marks the return of China Southern's India service after the six-year gap.
The sequence this fits into
Direct air connectivity between the two countries has been coming back in stages through 2026, each step involving a different carrier and a different city pair.
China Eastern Airlines restarted its direct Kunming–Kolkata service on 18 April. Air China resumed Beijing–Delhi in April, the second route to India to return under a Chinese carrier. On the Indian side, IndiGo began a daily non-stop service between Kolkata and Shanghai on 30 March, building on its reinstated Kolkata–Guangzhou flights and its subsequent operations from Delhi.
Those announcements followed the Ministry of External Affairs confirming that direct flights between India and China would resume. The services had been suspended through the COVID-19 pandemic and the period after the Doklam and Galwan standoffs.
Why routes are a useful measure
Air services are a slower signal than a communiqué and a more demanding one. Restoring a route requires both governments to settle slots, frequencies, bilateral traffic rights and visa handling. None of that happens on the strength of a warm meeting; it happens when officials on both sides have been instructed to clear the paperwork.
That makes the schedule a reasonable index of how far normalisation has actually reached. Four routes restored in roughly six months, by three Chinese carriers and one Indian one, is a substantial rebuild by the standards of the past six years — and still a fraction of the connectivity that existed before 2020.
The wider thaw
The flights sit inside a broader set of restorations since India and China reached an understanding in October 2024 that ended the military standoff in Ladakh. Since then the two countries have revived the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra and restarted traditional border trade through three designated routes, and India has eased visa procedures for Chinese nationals.
Hindustan Times reports that the boundary dispute and a trust deficit continue to constrain the relationship despite those steps.
Timing, and what it signals
The announcement landing on the morning of Xi's arrival is unlikely to be coincidental, though neither government has said so. Commercial aviation decisions of this kind are prepared over months; the date they are made public is a separate choice.
Xi left Beijing on Saturday for the 18th BRICS summit at Prime Minister Narendra Modi's invitation, with an entourage that includes Cai Qi, director of the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Xinhua reported. Xi was due to hold a bilateral meeting with Modi later the same day.
For passengers
For travellers, the practical effect is a second Delhi route to mainland China alongside Air China's Beijing service.
China Southern has not published fares or a frequency for the Delhi route in this announcement, beyond the regional total of more than 100 weekly flights across its eight South Asian round trips.
