China Southern to Restart Guangzhou-New Delhi Flights After Six Years

A Six-Year Gap Closes on the Guangzhou-New Delhi Corridor

China Southern Airlines will restore regular passenger service between Guangzhou and New Delhi on September 21, ending a six-year suspension and making it the third major Chinese carrier to return to Indian skies. The carrier announced the move on Saturday, the same day President Xi Jinping arrived in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit and ahead of his bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The route will be flown by Boeing 737-series aircraft. Outbound flight CZ359 is scheduled to leave Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport at 3:35 pm local time and land at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi at 7 pm. The return leg, CZ360, departs New Delhi at 8:20 pm and reaches Guangzhou at 4:15 am the following day.

China Southern said the resumption will make travel easier for tourists and students and will support trade between the two countries. Once the route reopens, the airline expects to operate more than 100 weekly flights across eight round-trip routes serving South Asia.

What the Carrier Is Actually Restoring

The service is not a new experiment. It is a repair. Direct air links between the world's two most populous countries were severed during the Covid-19 pandemic and stayed shut through the diplomatic freeze that followed the 2020 Galwan Valley clash, in which soldiers on both sides were killed. For nearly six years, travelers between China and India routed through Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong.

China Southern is the third major Chinese carrier to rebuild that map. China Eastern Airlines reinstated its Shanghai-New Delhi service in November 2025 and followed with a Kunming-Kolkata route on April 18. Air China relaunched Beijing-Delhi flights on April 21, operating three times a week on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays with an Airbus A330, with economy fares starting from roughly 3,570 yuan, or about US$523.

Indian carriers moved in parallel. Air India returned to mainland China on February 1 with non-stop Delhi-Shanghai flights, its first service there in nearly six years, and has signalled plans to add Mumbai-Shanghai. IndiGo launched daily non-stop Kolkata-Shanghai flights on March 30, after restoring Kolkata-Guangzhou and opening Delhi-Guangzhou on November 10, 2025. April operational data showed IndiGo load factors of 68 to 85 percent on several China routes, with Delhi-Guangzhou and Kolkata-Guangzhou performing strongly.

Qian Feng, director of the research department at Tsinghua University's National Strategy Institute, framed the reopening as a confidence signal rather than a purely commercial calculation. "China-India relations are currently in a process of improvement, and strengthening people-to-people and cultural exchanges is one of the important signs of this trend," he told the Global Times. Stronger personnel exchanges, he added, facilitate cooperation and build mutual trust.

The Economics Underneath the Timetable

The stakes are larger than seat counts. Bilateral goods trade between China and India reached US$151.1 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year, making China India's largest trading partner ahead of the United States. That headline carries an uncomfortable number underneath it: India's imports from China rose 16 percent to US$131.63 billion, while Indian exports to China climbed 36.66 percent to US$19.47 billion. The resulting deficit of US$112.16 billion is an all-time high, up from US$99.21 billion the previous year.

The composition of that trade explains why air links matter beyond passenger traffic. Roughly 66 percent of India's imports from China, worth about US$82.6 billion, are concentrated in electronics, machinery, computers and organic chemicals. China supplies about 43 percent of India's electronics imports, 40 percent of machinery and computer imports and 44 percent of organic chemicals. Those flows move by sea and air, and each restored route reduces the friction on business travel, technician rotation and time-sensitive components.

Investment has lagged far behind trade. India's cabinet approved changes to its foreign direct investment rules for land-border countries, opening a 60-day approval timeline for electronic components, capital goods and solar cells while retaining ownership and control safeguards. Chinese equity investment into India has been thin for years, and in 2024 Chinese outward investment into India was negative US$98.5 million, meaning divestments exceeded fresh commitments.

Japan Pays for the Shift

The contrast with Japan could hardly be sharper. Beijing's aviation map has been contracting in the northeast while expanding in the southwest, and the direction of travel is political rather than commercial.

After Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's November 7, 2025 remarks about the potential for Japanese involvement in a Taiwan contingency, Beijing issued travel and student advisories for Japan, restricted Japanese imports and slowed cultural exchanges. Chinese carriers then cut their December 2025 schedules to Japan by 23.2 percent in capacity and 24.3 percent in flights, according to OAG data analysed by Aviation Week. China Southern trimmed its own Japan capacity by 24 percent. Spring Airlines cut 36.3 percent, Juneyao Airlines 41.1 percent and Shenzhen Airlines nearly half. Twelve airport pairs, including Changsha-Osaka and Fuzhou-Nagoya, lost all non-stop service.

By February 2026, Chinese carriers had filed 1,783 one-way flights to Japan against 4,508 previously scheduled, a 60.5 percent reduction. March fell 63.4 percent on flights and 60.2 percent on seats, with Osaka Kansai down 73.8 percent. Bloomberg reported that Beijing instructed airlines in November 2025 to extend the cuts through March 2026, and the three largest carriers pushed their refund and rebooking deadlines to March 28.

The reduction continued through the summer. A total of 2,312 China-Japan flights were cancelled in July and August, or 30.7 percent of scheduled services, according to the aviation data provider Flight Master DAST, with July alone losing 1,195 flights. Independent analyst Li Hanming estimated that 780 more China-Japan flights were cancelled in September across 150 to 200 routes. Newsweek reported that all scheduled flights on 49 China-Japan routes had been cancelled at one point, more than 47 percent of the routes between the two countries.

Where the Aircraft Went Instead

Capacity rarely disappears; it moves. Japan dropped out of the top three international destinations for mainland departures during the July-August period, ranking behind South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia, according to Flight Master. The South China Morning Post reported that Chinese airlines shifted aircraft toward other Asian markets where demand remained stronger, even as the country's carriers completed a record-breaking summer for passenger numbers on low fares.

South Asia is the other destination for that freed capacity. China Southern's pledge of more than 100 weekly flights across eight round-trip routes in the region is not a gesture toward a single city pair but a network bet that the India thaw outlasts the summit that produced it. Air India's planned Delhi-Shanghai restart and a possible Mumbai-Shanghai link point in the same direction. Meanwhile Japan's airports and hospitality operators absorb the loss of a high-spending traveller cohort that has proved difficult to replace on short notice.

The Aviation Map as an Instrument of Diplomacy

Airlines follow demand, but in this market they also follow policy. The same carrier, China Southern, is cutting capacity to Japan and opening a route to India in the same season. That is not a coincidence of fleet planning; it is the visible edge of a state-directed reallocation of connectivity.

The political signals were already in place. India eased investment curbs. Modi's attendance at the Tianjin summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation opened the thaw, and Xi's arrival in New Delhi for the BRICS summit gives it a headline. Restored flights are one of the few deliverables in a relationship whose hard problems, from the border to the trade deficit, remain unresolved.

Japan, by contrast, has no such deliverable to point to. The dispute over Takaichi's Taiwan remarks has not been settled, and the flight map reflects it. Chinese carriers shifted wide-body capacity to Southeast Asia, where demand recovered faster, leaving Japan's airports and hospitality sector to absorb the loss of a high-spending traveller cohort.

What to Watch For

Three indicators will show whether the India thaw is durable or tactical. First, Air India's Delhi-Shanghai restart, announced for September with five weekly flights on Boeing 787-8 aircraft, will test whether Indian carriers match Chinese ambition rather than merely reciprocate. Second, the load factors and fares on the new Guangzhou-New Delhi route through the winter will reveal whether the traffic is genuinely business-driven or largely government-adjacent.

Third, and closest to Tokyo's interests, watch whether any China-Japan route guidance changes after the March 28 refund deadline passes and whether any leader-level contact produces a softening. Until then, expect Chinese capacity to keep flowing toward South and Southeast Asia, and expect Japan's carriers to keep competing for a smaller pool of Chinese travellers while their Chinese counterparts redeploy the aircraft elsewhere.

By Kenji Tanaka, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: Global Times, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg, Aviation Week, AeroRoutes, Times of India.