Current studies on ‘Global China’ often focus on foreign investment, transnational infrastructure projects, and large-scale movements of goods and people, predominantly portraying China as a state-centered power. This paper, inspired by feminist ethics of care, takes a different approach by exploring ‘global China’ through the lens of relational care. Based on ethnographic research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, it examines the complex relationships between Chinese diaspora community and Tanzanian orphans. These orphans, who have lost at least one parent, reside in institutionalized care centers and form intimate patron-beneficiary relationships with Chinese petty businessmen, professional expatriates, and Buddhist monks. Certainly, Africa’s orphan problem is not a new topic. While previous research has focused on how Africa’s transnational orphan industries are sustained by Western humanitarian ideologies and specific imaginings about orphans (e.g. Bornstein 2001; Fassin 2009; Millki 2010; Cheney 2017), this paper shifts the focus to the Chinese actors. It investigates how caring for Tanzanian orphans is intertwined with economic, political, and Buddhist rationales within a transnational circuit of care initiated by the Chinese diaspora communities in Tanzania. It also explores how the act of spending money and resources on impoverished children transforms Chinese migrants who are raised in post-socialist China and migrate to Africa for economic reasons into 'abled' subjects. By examining the activities and motivations of fabricating inter-ethnic ethical ties, this paper argues that China’s orphan-centered philanthropic efforts represent a process of learning to incorporate African others from a Chinese kinship perspective. This notion of ‘otherness,’ while rooted in cultural and ethnic perceptions of ‘black Africans,’ is not about irreducible differences. Instead, these differences can be gradually dissolved through empathy, affinity, and cultural edification. Ultimately, by problematizing the politics and ethics of Chinese grassroots philanthropy in Tanzania, this paper seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of relational ethics and cross-cultural negotiation in the Africa-Asia encounter.