China, India to resume direct flights by end October: spokesman

China and India will resume direct flights between designated cities by the end of October this year after a more than five-year hiatus, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Guo Jiakun confirmed on Thursday.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited China more than a month ago for the first time in seven years to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit 2025 in north China's port city of Tianjin, during which Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed with him that China and India were development partners, not rivals, and the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen trade ties amid global tariff uncertainty.

"China and India will resume direct flights by the end of October this year. This is the latest manifestation of the two sides' earnest implementation of the important consensus reached by President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi during their meeting in Tianjin on August 31, and is also a positive measure to facilitate friendly exchanges between the more than 2.8 billion people of China and India," Guo said at a press conference in Beijing.

"China is willing to work with India to view and handle China-India relations from a strategic height and long-term perspective, become good-neighborly friends and partners that help each other succeed, realize a cooperative pas de deux of the dragon and the elephant, benefit the two peoples more and better, and make due contributions to maintaining peace and prosperity in Asia and the world," he said.

China, India to resume direct flights by end October: spokesman

China, India to resume direct flights by end October: spokesman

China's fiscal revenue increased by 0.8 percent year on year to nearly 18.65 trillion yuan (about 2.63 trillion U.S. dollars) in the first 10 months of 2025, according to data released by the Ministry of Finance on Monday.

The central government collected approximately 8.19 trillion yuan in fiscal revenue during this period, which was down 0.8 percent year on year, while local governments collected 10.46 trillion yuan, up 2.1 percent.

In the first 10 months, China's tax revenue totaled 15.34 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.7 percent year on year. The country's non-tax revenue decreased by 3.1 percent to 3.31 trillion yuan during this period.

China's fiscal expenditure expanded 2 percent year on year to 22.58 trillion yuan during the first 10 months of 2025.

Spending on education came in at roughly 3.41 trillion yuan, up 4.7 percent year on year.

Science and technology expenditure totaled 784.7 billion yuan -- an increase of 5.7 percent.

Spending on social security and employment, meanwhile, came in at 3.77 trillion yuan during this period, up 9.3 percent.

China's fiscal revenue up 0.8 pct in first 10 months