A major-general in China's People's Liberation Army who commanded the 38th Army—15,000 troops with up to 300 armoured vehicles. In May 1989, when Chinese leaders decided that only the army could suppress the pro-democracy protests in Beijing, Xu refused to carry out the martial-law order issued for May 20th. Before a military judge at his secret court-martial in March 1990, he calmly and unapologetically explained his decision: "Good people and bad people are mixed together. The army and the ordinary citizens are mixed together. How can this be executed? Who should I hit?" He said moving in troops would involve "serious consequences" and that he did not want to be judged by history as a "criminal" for taking part. Although he recused himself from carrying out the order, he did transmit it, according to his testimony.
Xu was sentenced to five years in prison, considered relatively lenient. The Chinese authorities never made his refusal public. He died in 2021; censors scrubbed messages from Chinese social media that paid tribute to him.
In late 2025 a video of his court-martial, more than six hours long, was posted online by Wu Renhua, a historian of the Tiananmen Square upheaval who took part in the protests and later fled to America. Mr Wu would not reveal how he obtained it, saying on X, a social-media platform, that the leak was "completely unrelated to internal Chinese Communist Party or military power struggles". The day after it surfaced, China announced that the director of the State Secrecy Bureau and his deputy had been dismissed.
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