What might an anthropology of the present learn from examining knowledges created and deployed through China’s extensive experience of successive land reforms? How are these connected with embedded and with concurrent social transformations in relatedness, gender, care and community? These questions will be examined directly through ethnographic explorations in successive changes regarding land rights, political economy and community in the reform era in multiple rural locations in northern coastal and southwest interior China. While much of the international and comparative discussion of these issues has focused on policy from above and its changes, examination of the unfolding of these processes in the countryside indicates a complex through which local knowledges inform and mark national knowledge as they work through and remake agrarian sociality in living local communities. The consequences of these local knowledges and their complex and often contested processes of realization are locally salient in their immediate and anticipated familial and community effects. Further, what is determined and created in multiplicities of local knowledges in a current initiative affects the formulation of multi-stage national policy formulation for the subsequent initiative, as each round creates conditions and assessments that enter into new--and sometimes substantively different—national knowledges. Elements of these knowledge processes, as ethnographically encountered in different stages of the reform era will be presented, with specific reference to community, care and gendered knowledges. This mode of dynamic, dispersed and local knowledge creation will be situated historically as emerging in recent form during a long sequence of land reforms and as having roots in distinctive features of China’s perduring mode of agrarian polity and sociality.