Lee, 87, hailed from a generation of patriotic Chinese intellectuals who gradually became disillusioned with the Communist regime and advocated greater freedoms for Hong Kong, their adopted home.

The evolution of Lee’s politics took three decades and mirrored changing attitudes in Hong Kong as the former British colony weathered its transition to Chinese rule.

Lee was “Hong Kong’s Voltaire”, an “archetype of a liberal intellectual” who sided with the powerless and spoke up for freedom and common sense, Hong Kong columnist Chip Tsao wrote on Facebook.

Lee died this morning in Taipei, his daughters wrote in a Facebook statement.

Born in Guangzhou in 1936, Lee moved to Hong Kong as a teenager and was caught up in the nationalist fervour of the time, eventually landing an editorial role at a 1970s leftist magazine.

But Lee chafed at Beijing’s ideological strictures and his politics took an about turn – a rare conversion among his cohort of writers.

By the 2000s, he was in charge of the editorial page of the now-shuttered Apple Daily, then Hong Kong’s biggest pro-democracy newspaper and a perennial thorn in Beijing’s side.

As Hong Kong’s democracy movement grew, Lee split with some of his peers by backing younger, more radical activists that China deems subversive.

After Hong Kong saw massive and sometimes violent democracy protests in 2019, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law that targeted dissent.

Lee bade farewell to his Apple Daily column saying that the security law exerted a “concrete pressure” that he had not encountered in 60 years of writing.

He then moved to Taiwan, where he continued to publish regularly on his Facebook page.

In one of his last missives, he recalled joining Hong Kong’s million-strong democracy protest in June 2019.

“Hongkongers had woken up. Authoritarianism can suppress the actions of these people, but it cannot suppress their awakening.”