Again, in the civil war between Communists and Nationalists for control of China in the late 1920s and early ’30s, most of the Communists focused on taking cities, as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia. But Mao Tse-tung, an outsider within the dogmatic Chinese Communist Party, was able to look at China in a clear light and see China’s center of gravity as its vast peasant population. Win them to his side, he believed, and the revolution could not fail. That single insight proved the key to the Communists’ success. Such is the power of identifying the center of gravity.
