Xue began playing
basketball as a child, but disliked the physical contact of that sport. She then played
indoor volleyball from the age of 10 to 13 before settling into beach volleyball. She began training for her sports career in 2000 at the Fuzhou Sports Training School after she caught the attention of coach Zhou Guoqin, who immediately recruited her to the team and began to train her in indoor volleyball after she already had grown to 167 cm. In 2002, she attended the Athletic Sports College of Fuzhou and became a member of the Chinese national beach volleyball team. Xue then made her
Swatch-FIVB World Tour debut in 2005, playing in two events with
You Wenhui and winning the FIVB Top Rookie award for 2006. On 28 May 2006, Xue teamed up with Zhang Xi for the first time and became the youngest player to ever win a major event, when the 17-year-old won the $400,000 China Shanghai Jinshan Open. Later in 2006, Xue and Zhang won the gold medal in the women's team competition at the
Doha Asian Games. The pair also won the bronze medal in women's beach volleyball at the
2008 Summer Olympics in
Beijing. The pair had great success in 2010, which included winning the Grand Slam in
Moscow, Russia, for the second time. They also achieved an extraordinary gold medal win on the FIVB World Tour Women's Final in
Åland, Finland, by snapping the record gold-medal winning-streak of Brazil's
França–
Silva duo on 21 August 2010. In 2009, they won the gold medal at the
Asian Beach Volleyball Championships in
Haikou, China, and retained the title in 2010. They then went on to win more golds at the Sanya Open in Hainan, the
Guangzhou Asian Games, and the
Asian Beach Games in
Muscat, Oman. The team of Xue and Zhang were ranked 4th overall on the 2010
FIVB Beach Volleyball World Rankings and finished the season ranked 1st in the FIVB World Rankings. Xue and Zhang represented China in the
2012 London Olympics and settled at 4th place. Xue also competed at the
2020 Tokyo Olympics with
Wang Xinxin held in 2021 and at the
2024 Paris Olympics with
Xia Xinyi and placed at 9th. ==Playing partners==