On the Threshold of Spring is a vehicle for Xie to display his talents in art and develop his own artistic style. It is a fine piece that shows humanitarianism and is filled with human kindness, drama, and a quality suggestive of poetry or painting.

Haixia was produced during the Cultural Revolution. With the fishermen's life on the southeastern coast in the early 1960s as its background, the film depicts a group of militia women who work both as fisher women and fighters defending their homes and the motherland. What is praise-worthy is that in making the film, Xie broke through the fetters of ultra-leftist art and adopted a prose-like style, trying his best to show the rich content and variety of life. It shows the efforts he made in art exploration.

Since 1977, Xie Tieli has directed The Torrential River, The Stars Are Bright Tonight, Bao and His Son, Intimate Friends, A Dream of Red Mansions, The Moon Goes Down Over the Yuchang River and The Net of Heaven. Xie is highly cultured and has a wide vision and a good command of various techniques of artistic expression. He is able to show radical social and great historical changes and is especially good at coming close to the characters to reveal their inner feelings and delineating the ways of the world. What especially deserves to be pointed out is that his accomplishments in art gave him a preference for noted literary works, and he often recomposed them and made them into films while keeping the style of the original.