The US tapped out its highest-profit traditional oil wells a long time ago, and used the export profits to grow its economy. Now the US is awash in fracked gas.
The "sit on it" strategy assumes that the resource held in reserve will not become obsolete. It makes more sense to me to pull it all out of the ground as fast as you can, so you can sell more of it when the global price is highest, rather than being forced to buy at that time.
Didn't China learn anything from its rare earths play? The supply curve never really hits a brick wall. As long as the price keeps going up, the market keeps producing more to sell. And even if you hit a hard limit, such as by exhausting all the cheap wells and mines, human ingenuity often produces an acceptable substitute.
Many countries are burning the petroleum as fast as they can, keeping the computers running for the engineers researching wind, solar, nuclear fission, geothermal, hydrogen, fracking, cellulose enzymes, algae oils, nuclear fusion, radioisotope thermal, external combustion engines, generator-electric hybrids, fuel cells, denser batteries, more efficient motors and transmissions, and a whole host of other technologies that will finally be ready to take over, once the last oil on Earth is being burned by China to keep its lights on and tractors running.
Everyone else will be running their tractors with fuels mixed up from agricultural waste, and keeping the lights on with a dozen different competing technologies.
It seems like a bad strategy to me, but I'm not Chinese.