[3] In 1942, Xu was sent by the Kuomintang government to work and train at the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in the United States, where he participated in the design of jet interceptors.

Most team members were recent university graduates, and only three people: Xu, Huang, and Lu Xiaopeng, had any aircraft design experience.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the development cycle was less than half that of similar planes designed in Japan and Czechoslovakia and the performance was superior.

[5] The development of the JJ-1 marked a new era of China's aircraft manufacturing industry,[2][3] and a number of Xu's team members, including Gu Songfen, Guan De, Tu Jida, Chen Yijian [zh], and Feng Zhongyue (冯钟越), later became China's top aircraft designers.

[3] In May 1964, Xu was abruptly transferred from Shenyang to the 603 Design Institute of the Xi'an Aircraft Company in Yanliang, Shaanxi.

He designed an air conditioning system for the Ilyushin Il-28 bomber and its Chinese version, the Harbin H-5, but mainly focused on training engineers and translating and writing technical literature.

[3] When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Xu was summoned back to Shenyang Aircraft in June, where he was denounced as a "capitalist academic authority".

His brother, Xu Chi, was a famous writer known for his popular biographies of Chen Jingrun and Li Siguang.

His third sister, Xu He (徐和), was the wife of Wu Xiuquan, who served as Vice Foreign Minister of China.

He worked in a brick factory for eight years, and entered college after the Cultural Revolution and became an aerospace engineer.

Their youngest son, Xu Yuan (徐源), became a tenured professor of mathematics at an American university.