The accessibility of cheap and abundant oil fueled the machinery of capitalism and democracy in the global north. In contrast, China was known as a pinyouguo (oil-poor nation: a country with scarce oil reserves). But this notion was no less about a technocratic and nationalistic construction than geological features. It stemmed from Standard Oil’s failed scheme of oil prospects in the 1910s and was compounded by the Nationalist government’s uneasy extraction at the Yumen oilfield during WWII. After 1949, this technocratic concept merged with the Maoist ideal of anti-elite and decolonial politics, leading to China’s unique techno-politics of petroleum in the Cold War era. Through examining China’s history of petroleum scarcity, my project shows that the rise of oil dependence in modern China was not the mimicry of Anglozone-centric modernity but a technopolitical and geopolitical choice collectively shaped by foreign oil companies, geologists, technocrats, revolutionaries, and oil workers.