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A frank dialogue between Chinese and U.S. defense chiefs has taken the two countries into a temporary calm period after a series of rival military moves in the South China Sea. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis agreed with his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, on Friday to continue progress on a "crisis communications and deconfliction framework to reduce risk," the Defense Department said in a statement. Their meeting touched on Beijing's military expansion in the South China Sea. The U.S. side asked China to stop militarizing the sea, while the Chinese told the U.S. government to quit sending naval ships near China-held islets and said it would oppose any acts to split off those land forms. But both agreed that the military relationship "could be a stabilizing factor" in broader Sino-U.S. ties, the Defense Department added. Analysts said dialogue such as this one in Washington normally brings about a calm period in Sino-U.S. military ties after a series of tougher moves, such as a near ship collision in the sea in September. They predicted the calm would last at least through a Nov. 30-Dec. 1 meeting between the two countries' presidents. Neither Beijing nor Washington is expected to stop the activities that annoy the other. But both sides will "cool down" because of the meetings, said Collin Koh, a maritime security research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. "It is very hard to ignore the fact that they don't actually agree on many things that are in fact the root problems of what we see in the South China Sea," he said. | 
