[7][8][9][10] Xu has served as a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and previously worked as a journalist for The New York Times.

[11] In 2020, Xu participated in a rare debate on Australian national television with Xining Wang, then Deputy Head of Mission at the Chinese Embassy in Australia.

Xu's working-class upbringing saw her parents making substantial sacrifices for her education, including paying for violin, English, and Olympic mathematics lessons.

[20] A high-achieving student, Xu ranked first in her city on the high school entrance exam and earned a bronze medal in Gansu Province's Olympiad mathematics competition.

[2][3][4] Her reporting has covered a range of topics, including geopolitics,[28] business,[29] human rights issues,[30] Australian current affairs,[31] and global supply chains[6].

In March 2020, Xu and her team at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published the report Uyghurs for Sale, which documented evidence showing that Chinese authorities displacing Uyghur people from Xinjiang to other regions in China, then using them as forced labor to manufacture goods for global brands such as Adidas, Apple, BMW and Nike.

[6] The report was widely cited by US government agencies, European and Australian parliaments, and various civil society organizations, all of which expressed concerns over China's treatment of ethnic and religious minorities.

[37][38][20] In 2024, Xu participated in a one-off comedy event in Melbourne alongside Cheng Lei, an Australian journalist who had been detained in China.