Former Hanyang University Prof. Lee Young-hee, often called a liberal intellectual of the age, died Sunday. He was 81.

He died at a Seoul hospital he entered with chronic liver cirrhosis.

Lee was a liberal thinker and journalism scholar who never gave in to authoritarian power and devoted his life to journalism, democracy and education.

In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, he joined the South Korean army as an interpretation officer, and seven years later was discharged as a major. During the war, he participated in operations to subjugate communist guerrillas in the Jiri and Sokri mountains.

He began to work as a reporter for a local news agency in 1957.

In 1961, he contributed an article opposing then Gen. Park Chung-hee’s May 16 military coup to foreign news media. In 1964, an article that he wrote as a local daily reporter about the U.N. plan to recognize South and North Korea simultaneously led to his arrest on charges of breaking the anti-communism law.

In 1977, he served time in jail on account of praising the Chinese Communist Party in his book about China.

While serving as a journalism professor in Hanyang from 1972 to 1995, he was laid off twice for four years each ― once under the Park government and once during the Chun Doo-hwan regime.

He was sacked four times during his working career, including twice as a reporter.

In 1989, Lee was put behind bars for violating the National Security Law on charges of planning a reporting trip to North Korea for the dissident daily Hankyoreh Shinmun. He was jailed three times during his life.

He was evaluated as a guru to the nation’s liberal force with his prolific writings and as a social critic and activist advocating social democracy.

Lee, who lived a hard life of dismissals and imprisonments, had a stroke in 2000, and since then refrained from writing.

His books were regarded as must-reads by dissident student activists in the 1970s and the 1980s.

In one of his best-known books published in 1974, titled “The Logic of Transition Period,” he tried to take off the mask of anticommunism and tear down bias on China, Japan, the United States and Vietnam. He tried to project the Cultural Revolution on the basis of historical facts and logic. He asserted in the book that the Vietnam War should be understood as a people’s struggle against imperialism and anti-popular power.

He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.

By Chun Sung-woo (swchun@heraldcorp.com)