Note: This is a feature that was written about us back in April. We wanted to share this with you because we think it captures how we approach our mission here at DHgate.

In a nondescript concrete building on a quiet, tree-lined street in the heart of Beijing’s university district, Diane Wang and 300 of her followers are plotting a revolution. Working elbow-to-elbow in Spartan conditions with an unmistakable air of urgency, the team, forged into a focused, disciplined unit after four years of preparation and initial effort, almost radiates anticipation.

But this intense band of young people is not planning the overthrow of any mere government. They are targeting what the diminutive Wang sees as a more insidious tyranny: the oligarchy of Wal-Mart and its clique of massive retailers who have decimated America’s main streets, seeking to return small mom-and-pop businesses to their rightful place at the heart of a better shopping experience.

“Over the last three decades, big-box retailers have convinced Americans that we have a choice: either we can have everyday low prices, or we can have vibrant, personalized, attentive, caring, and unique retail experiences,” said Wang, President and CEO of DHgate.com. “They lied. That’s a false choice, and our goal is to help Americans take back their street from the retail oligarchs.”

The petite Beijing native seems an unlikely revolutionary. A veteran of executive positions at technology giants Microsoft and Cisco and a graduate of one of the nations top universities, Wang is a member of a small class of young Chinese who blend the skills, experience, and charisma that will make them China’s first generation of global business leaders. Any of a hundred multinationals would hire her on her own terms, and having already built and sold an e-commerce company, Joyo.com, to Amazon, she could afford to sit on a beach for the rest of her life.

So why this quest?

Sitting down with her in a tiny, quiet coffee house not far from her frenetic headquarters, Diane Wang comes across as warm and self-assured, her gestures, her tone, and her modest demeanor radiate an air of quiet gentility. But when the conversation turns to the world economy, she becomes impassioned.

As a part of the first generation in China to come of age after the country began opening to the outside world in 1978, Wang gained a perspective on the world denied to her elders. “As I grew, I learned that what makes America unique and powerful is not bombers, tanks, or aircraft carriers,” she said, stirring the ice in her Diet Coke. “It is not even the New York Stock Exchange. What makes America unique in the world and what keeps it a beacon today is that a man or a woman, fed up with having to work for a living wage, can start a business with his or her own two hands and make a better life.”

“At the heart of that is small retailing, selling something you are passionate about to others who are passionate about it. The technology start-ups may get all of the media coverage, but most small businesses find success buying with care and selling with passion.”

Inspired by America as a nation of mom-and-pop shops and excited about the promise of technology, Wang created Joyo.com to put fun back into bookselling in a country where the passion and the excitement had been drained out of the bookstore.

After she sold Joyo to Amazon.com in 2003 she started to travel more, and she was stunned to find that the warm, quaint shopping streets of America – and the idea that retail could be a path to independence – were dying, victims of what others had begun to call “The Wal-Mart Effect.”

“I woke up one day struck by the realization that I understood not only how the big-box retailers and the category had done it, but also how I could help the little guy fight back.”

So Diane Wang went into business again. But this time it was different.

***

Wang started DHgate to help revive and rejuvenate small retailers and wholesalers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, armed with the understanding that, done right, e-commerce could level the playing field between the smallest businesses and the largest. With a perspective that covered both the sourcing side and the selling side, she knew that what turned the big boys from large retailers that could share the mall with their smaller cousins into the massive mom-and-pop killers that they are today was the supply chain.

“Wal-Mart created this mystique around being frugal, and the message was that because they didn’t have fancy offices or perks or stores, they were able to pass the savings onto the customer,” Wang said. “Today, we know that was not the whole truth.”

The real difference, Wang says, is that the world’s larger retailers had the resources to send people on worldwide product hunts, buy the goods from the lowest cost provider, and import them. The little store had to depend on middlemen and long supply chains of distributors, limiting their section and raising their costs.

Equally frustrating for small businesses was the web of arcane practices, documents, and jargon that have grown up around international business that made buying from overseas complex, time-consuming, and costly. “The more you look at it [the international trade system], the more you start to think that globalization might have been specifically designed to keep small businesses out,” she said. “That was the problem that needed fixing.”

Armed with her knowledge of China and her experience with e-Commerce, Wang pulled together a team to build a website that would give every small business – no matter how small – access to the power of a global supply chain. But she knew that in order to be successful, she had to drag the entire system of international commerce into the 21st century, making it more user-friendly in the process.

Her goal with DHgate is simple: make it as easy for a small business to buy products overseas as it is for a consumer to buy a book from Amazon. Executing, of course, is not so simple. It means creating a platform that acts like a causeway over the muck-filled swamp of outdated international business practices that are so old Marco Polo would probably recognize them.

The platform is coming together faster than she expected, Wang says. There are over 300,000 suppliers signed up, listing 11,000,000 products across 4,000 different categories. The company has put together agreements with shipping companies to aggregate business and drive down the cost of getting the product to the buyers in the United States, and has worked with PayPal and other partners to build a proprietary escrow payment system that protects both buyer and seller.

Buyers and sellers are required to rate each other on the completion of each transaction, ensuring that everyone can find the most service-oriented suppliers. And for those rare occasions that disputes arise, DHgate even built an easy-to-use, multilayer dispute resolution system designed to protect everyone’s interests.

“We are making buying direct from manufacturers overseas safe, efficient, and even easier than ordering from a local distributor,” Wang says. “And we are making this happen at a time when America is turning to small businesses to put the economy back on track.”

And that, says Wang, is what keeps her team energized. “The world needs the American Dream,” Wang says. “Our job is to bring that dream to life, one small business at a time.”