China Mills (she/her) is the Head of Research and leads the Deaths by Welfare Project, documenting welfare state violence by centring the resistance of people with lived experience of the welfare system, and the strategies of bereaved families, in fighting for justice. China cultivates research practices which foster cross movement solidarity and build towards life affirming systems and infrastructures. 

China is part of the Stigma Free Futures design team at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, working alongside people with lived experience of poverty stigma. For many years, China worked as an academic researching and teaching global mental health, with a focus on state and corporate production of harm, distress and deaths by suicide. She has been published widely, including her book Decolonizing Global Mental Health (published in 2014 by Routledge); Weaponising time in the war on welfare: Slow violence and deaths of disabled people within the UK’s social security system, with John Pring; and Dead people don’t claim.