When Xie was born, there
was a famine in China. He grew up during the
Cultural Revolution and therefore could not attend school, but had to work in the countryside. From 1979 to 1983 he studied German and English at the
Sun Yat-sen University in
Guangzhou. After graduation (B.A.), he worked as an interpreter for
VW in
Shanghai. In 1988, he went to study German language and literature, journalism and European ethnology at the
Otto-Friedrich University in
Bamberg,
Germany. In 1993 he graduated with a
thesis on the press policies of the
Chinese Communist Party. From 1993 to 1996, he studied law at the
Friedrich-Alexander-University in
Erlangen-
Nuremberg. By 1989, Xie was chairman of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars in Germany e.V. In 1999 he founded the
Chinese language journal "European Chinese News" that appeared until 2011. Since 2006 Xie has been editor of the Christian magazine "Overseas Campus". In 2010, Xie was selected among the "Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals" by the Chinese newspaper
Southern Weekly. On 20 April 2013, the members of the
Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bamberg selected Xie to the county board. He got 141 of 220 votes, the best result of all county board members. In 2014, Xie was elected to the Bamberg City Council with the most votes of all CSU candidates. Xie is vice president of the
Association of Chinese language writers in Europe and lives with his wife Shenhua Xie Zhang in Bamberg, where he runs the China Fan snack bar. He has been a German citizen since 2010. Xie's life has been described in several publications: the newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung (2001), the newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2009), the book
Bavaria – land in the heart of Europe (2015), the book
Bamberg – Portrait of a city (Gmeiner-Verlag, 2017), the newspaper
The Huffington Post (2018, in German). == Works (selection) ==