Born in 1957 in Shanghai, Xu Jilin dropped out of school and became a librarian because of the Cultural Revolution.
In 2003, he returned to the East China Normal University where he continued his career.
[2] Xu Jilin serves on the editorial board of the journal Twenty-First Century Bimonthly, published by Chinese University of Hong Kong.
[4] Xu is a liberal who disavows what he terms the political extremes.
He believes in "small government, big society",[4] and criticized the statist, conservative[5] intellectual current of the Chinese New Left.