The book is much better than my one-sentence summary of it. As a small example, the author notes that Communist forces would often set up bases on the boundary of two warlords' areas, so that they could not be surrounded.
In the first example of controlling the middle vs the edges, well, there are chess openings with the strategy of explicitly giving up the center. A reply in a different chain on this post mentions these, known as hypermodern openings.
It does sound like a good book since I'm a fan of history, chess, and go, so I'll give it a read.