After sympathizing with the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, he left the country and lived in self-exile in the United States.
[2] He became the director of the Hong Kong branch of the Xinhua News Agency from 1983 to 1989,[3][4] then China's de facto political presence in the territory.
After the military crackdown in June, he fled to the United States and lived there in exile.
In 1997, he joined an appeal to the National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing to reverse the government report condemning the 1989 Tiananmen student protests.
[7] In a 2016 interview with the Hong Kong journalist Simon Kei Shek Ming, published in Initium Media, Xu, who had been recently released from hospital, predicted that Xi Jinping would arrest "higher level" tigers in the CCP.