Six years is a genuinely long time for two cities this size to have zero direct flights between them. Delhi and Guangzhou went that whole stretch without one.
COVID killed the route first, and then the fallout from the 2020 Galwan Valley clash kept it dead long after the pandemic itself had stopped being a real excuse for anything. China Southern Airlines announced Saturday that it's had enough of that. Daily flights resume September 21.
Same day Xi landed. Make of that what you will.
The airline's running Guangzhou-Delhi daily from the 21st onward, part of a wider South Asia expansion that comes out to more than 100 weekly flights across eight round-trip routes. One schedule detail is already public: flight CZ360 leaves Delhi at 8:20pm and touches down in Guangzhou at 4:15am.
Overnight, long haul, built for someone who wants to land and walk straight into a meeting rather than kill a day recovering.
And honestly, China Southern's a little late to this particular party.
Air China already brought Beijing-Delhi back in April, three times a week to start.
China Eastern restarted Kunming-Kolkata that same month. IndiGo got there earliest of all, launching a daily nonstop Kolkata-Guangzhou route back on October 26, 2025, then adding Delhi-Guangzhou service that November.
A Chinese diplomat at that first IndiGo flight called it "a very important day," which is diplomatic speak for "we've been waiting on this a while, and frankly so have you." Air India's in the mix too, with a February 2026 restart out of Delhi already confirmed and a Mumbai-Shanghai route planned after that.
So no, this isn't some sudden thaw. It's the fifth or sixth airline rejoining a network that's been quietly rebuilding itself, one carrier at a time, for close to a year now.
Twenty Indian soldiers died in Galwan back in June 2020.
Worst confrontation on that border in decades, by a wide margin.
Flights stopped, trade slowed, and diplomatic visits mostly just didn't happen for years afterward. Nothing really moved again until October 2024, when both countries worked out a patrolling arrangement in eastern Ladakh.
That's what finally cleared the way for Modi and Xi to hold their first bilateral meeting in five years, on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan that same month.
It's been a slow crawl since. Modi went to China in 2025 for the SCO summit, his first trip there in seven years, and came back describing India and China as "development partners, not rivals."
This past August, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval sat down with Chinese Vice President Han Zheng in Beijing for the 25th round of talks aimed specifically at keeping the border quiet.
Roughly 400 Chinese officials traveled with Xi this trip. That's more than double the 200 or so who came in 2019. Nobody picks a number like that by accident, and it's usually the clearest signal of how seriously a government is treating a visit, more than anything said in an official statement.
The wider BRICS agenda for this summit apparently covers regional security in West Asia, financing through the New Development Bank, and pushing more trade toward local currencies instead of dollars.
Standard fare for a bloc still trying to carve out leverage outside Western-run institutions. None of that's really what people are watching for, though. The bilateral meeting, expected at Bharat Mandapam, is where the actual story sits. Border tension.
Trade imbalance. Problems that predate Galwan by years and haven't gone anywhere in the meantime.
One thing's locked in, at least. September 21. Daily. Delhi to Guangzhou. Eight and a half hours in the air, first time in six years.
China Southern Airlines announced it will resume daily passenger flights between Guangzhou and New Delhi from September 21, ending a six-year suspension caused by COVID-19 and the fallout from the 2020 Galwan Valley border clash.
The announcement coincided with Chinese President Xi Jinping's arrival in New Delhi for the 18th BRICS Summit, his first visit to India in seven years, accompanied by a delegation of roughly 400 officials.
The route's return follows a string of earlier restarts: IndiGo's Kolkata-Guangzhou and Delhi-Guangzhou services in late 2025, Air China's Beijing-Delhi flights and China Eastern's Kunming-Kolkata route in April 2026, and Air India's planned February 2026 restart.
The broader thaw traces back to an October 2024 border patrolling agreement that led to Modi and Xi's first bilateral meeting in five years, followed by Modi's 2025 visit to China for the SCO summit and continued special representative talks on border peace. Xi and Modi are expected to hold bilateral talks at Bharat Mandapam during the summit.
