This chapter critically examines the contradictions within care ethics as they are institutionalised in the everyday labour of community-based caregivers in urban China. While feminist geographers have increasingly called for an ethical geography of care grounded in attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, this chapter argues that these very ideals, when embedded in job requirements, may reinforce rather than resist exploitation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Shanghai and Beijing, three key arguments are presented. First, care ethics compel caregivers to perform bodily, stigmatised, and emotional labour simultaneously. Second, these ethics reshape caregiver–care recipient relationships, producing new subjectivities that blur the boundary between work and life. Third, such subjectivities often place caregivers in a “prison of love,” where ethical commitment justifies long hours and low wages. By theorising care work through this lens, the chapter questions whether the institutionalisation of care ethics genuinely contributes to social justice or simply reconfigures the terms of precarity under the guise of morality.