... was born in 1948 in Sichuan Province. During the Cultural Revolution he organized a "rebel faction" in Guangzhou which led to his first arrest in 1968.

Together with Li Zhengtian and Chen Yiyang, Wang Xizhe wrote in 1974 - under the pseudonym  Li Yizhe, composed of parts of the three names - the manifesto "On Democracy and Legality under Socialism" that was officially criticized, but made the authors well-known all over the country. In 1977 Wang was, like other members of the group, arrested again, but released and formally rehabilitated in January 1979.

Wang immediately joined the "Beijing Spring" Democracy Movement, edited an independent journal in Guangzhou and participated in 1980 in the Ganjiakou Conference where he discussed with Xu Wenli and others the formal foundation of an opposition party. Wang was arrested in April 1980 and eventually sentenced to a 14 years prison term for "counter-revolutionary subversion".

In 1997, he managed to leave China for the US, where he settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. In exile Wang Xizhe participated in various groups and activities, but others criticized his "leftist" positions and certain positive remarks by him on Mao, violence in the Cultural Revolution or the deposed former Chongqing Mayor and "Neo-Maoist" Bo Xilai. Wang defines himself as a "Social Democrat" who opposes today's Chinese Communist Party because of its corruption and "capitalist" politics.