India, China to resume direct flights after 5 years
India and China plan to resume direct flights in October 2025, between some of their cities after a five-year suspension as relations between the two countries begin to thaw, Indian authorities have announced.
The closer ties come in the face of the United States President Donald Trump administration’s aggressive trade policies.
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Direct flights between the two countries were suspended during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and did not resume as Beijing and New Delhi engaged in prolonged border tensions.
Latest move underscores efforts to normalise ties and draw closer in the wake of Trump’s policies, stiff tariffs.
On Thursday, October 2, 2025, India’s embassy to China said in a post on social media platform WeChat that flights between designated cities will resume by late October, subject to commercial carriers’ decisions.
The resumption is part of the Indian government’s “approach towards gradual normalisation of relations between India and China,” the embassy added.
India’s largest carrier, IndiGo, announced that it would resume flights from Kolkata, India, to Guangzhou, China, from October 26, 2025.
The resumption comes after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China for the first time in seven years to attend the September 2025 meeting of the regional security bloc, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
There, Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed that India and China were development partners, not rivals, and discussed ways to strengthen trade ties amid global tariff uncertainty fuelled by Trump.
The US president raised the tariff rate on Indian imports to a stiff 50 per cent last month, citing the nation’s continuing purchases of Russian oil. He also urged the European Union to slap 100 per cent tariffs on China and India as part of his efforts to pressure Moscow to end its war in Ukraine.
Relations between China and India plummeted in 2020 after security forces clashed along a disputed border in the Himalayan mountains. Four Chinese soldiers and 20 Indian soldiers were killed in the worst violence in decades, freezing high-level political engagements.
The Financial Times, which first reported the news, said Trump indicated he was prepared to impose steeper tariffs on China and India, two major buyers of Russian oil, if European nations did as well.
“We’re ready to go, ready to go right now, but we’re only going to do this if our European partners step up with us,” he said.
