Meerzat Omuralieva, a 31-year-old woman from Kyrgyzstan, runs a jewelry business in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, which is home to the world’s largest small commodities market and has embraced merchants from around the globe. Omuralieva first began working as a volunteer on the city’s mediation committee for disputes relating to foreign trade and transactions when she was studying at college in Yiwu in 2017. Now, the committee has employed her as a full-time mediator.
As the annual number of overseas business-people flowing into Yiwu has regularly exceeded 550,000 in previous years, the demand for mediation on commercial and customs-related disputes has been growing. As early as 2013, the municipal government established the mediation committee for international disputes.
Over the past decade,
