China has in recent years grown increasingly assertive in staking its claims in the contested South China Sea, including by building artificial islands and militarising them.
It effectively suspended military talks with the United States in late 2022 in response to then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
The two sides agreed after a summit between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in November last year to restart high-level military talks.
Austin and Dong then talked over the phone in April.
Their meeting in Singapore – announced by the Pentagon last week – would be the most substantial encounter on defence since the presidential summit.
However, the two sides have yet to resume much of the direct military dialogue that was scrapped after Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.
“The hope here is for the (Dong-Austin) meeting to be the beginnings of cautious rapprochement to re-establish military-to-military open lines of communication,” Mustafa Izzuddin, senior international affairs analyst with consultancy Solaris Strategies Singapore, told AFP.