Wei Ting-chao was born on 27 March 1935 into a Hakka village at Wushulin in Longtan, Taoyuan. He often discussed international affairs and Taiwan's future with his university classmate Hsieh Tsung-min and with Peng Ming-min, head of the politics department at National Taiwan University, and in 1964 the three decided to set their thinking down: full re-election of the legislature, and Taiwan's future to be decided by its own people. The Declaration of Taiwanese Self-Salvation was written in his hand.

On 20 September 1964, before the declaration could be distributed, all three were arrested and charged with sedition. The verdicts came on 8 April the following year: ten years for Hsieh Tsung-min, eight each for Peng Ming-min and Wei Ting-chao.

He was released in 1970. The next year, after a bomb went off at the Citibank branch in Taipei, he was named in what was cast as a violent independence plot, arrested along with Li Ao and others, and sentenced to ten years. Released again, he was arrested a third time over the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979. Before martial law was lifted he had served seventeen years, three months and seven days as a political prisoner.

He died on 28 December 1999. Of the three names on the declaration, Peng Ming-min went into exile and came back to run for president, Hsieh Tsung-min became a legislator, and Wei Ting-chao stayed mostly at the edge of the record. The words of that document were first set down, stroke by stroke, by him.