Xu opposed the radical policies of the Cultural Revolution, and was persecuted to death by the followers of Mao Zedong, Lin Biao and the Gang of Four.

[3] Because his parents were elderly they were unable to support Xu after his expulsion, and he was forced to return home and work at his family's kiln.

[2] After becoming a professional soldier, Xu worked for six years in the service of various military forces established by local warlords, and in the Nationalist Army.

After the Shanghai massacre of 1927, Xu escaped the Nationalist Army and begun organizing a guerrilla resistance unit in Hubei.

In 1934, the Nationalists' fourth encirclement campaign against the Eyuwan Soviet forced Xu and the 25th Red Army to retreat to the Shannxi-Sichuan border area.

[1] Xu was ordered to guard the rear of the Communist retreat during the Long March,[2] but he soon lost contact with the rest of the Red Army after the evacuation began, and he led his forces northward independently.

[8] In February 1936, Xu and Liu Zhidan (who was killed in the operation) led 34,000 Communist guerillas into southwestern Shanxi, which was ruled by a Nationalist-aligned warlord, Yan Xishan.

Xu's strategy of guerrilla warfare was extremely effective against, and demoralizing for Yan's forces, who repeatedly fell victim to surprise attacks.

Xu made good use of cooperation supplied by local peasants to evade and easily locate Yan's forces.

When reinforcements sent by the central government forced Xu to withdraw from Shanxi, the Red Army escaped by splitting into small groups that were actively supplied and hidden by local supporters.

In his book, Red Star Over China, Snow wrote that, among the Communists in Yan'an, none were more famous or mysterious than Xu Haidong.

[citation needed] After the outbreak of the Second Sino Japanese War (1937–1945), Xu was named commander of the 344th Brigade of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army[1] (this was effectively a demotion).

Xu was successful in containing Japanese forces active in central China, contributing to communist attempts to establish an anti-Japanese base area in eastern Anhui.

In the 1959 Lushan Conference, Xu sided with Peng Dehuai in opposing Mao's Great Leap Forward:[13] a radical economic programme that caused a man-made famine in which tens of millions of people starved to death.