Xu later lived in Orange County, California, United States. 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.[4] 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.[5] He died in June 2016 at the age of 100.[6]
