Huh, interesting - I agree with china_shop that there's also Duty, but even without that, your pieces should make more sense.

One thing to note about Shen Wei is that he grew up in a war zone, after having all his family stripped away from him at a young age, including the brother he swore to protect. I think that left him with some serious attachment issues, as well as a streak of not-quite-fatalism that manifests as him participating in Dixing's suboptimal systems (vs full-time reforming them). He's also not as effortlessly good at people as Zhao Yunlan is: baby Shen Wei, before and after the dirt nap, was just a touch naive about human interaction. All that chromium shell and verbal slipperiness is growth from living on the surface, interacting with people as a pretend human. He's improved a lot, but he's still a far cry from being someone who can turn up and manipulate the opposition into agreeing with him like Zhao Yunlan could.

Shen Wei lost his parents and brother. Later, he lost absolutely everything. He time traveled into the future with no way to go back away from the unknown.

I'm convinced the number one reason Shen Wei fell for Kunlun so hard was that Kunlun was a pleasant existential crisis. All his life, he'd known only war and desolation, and here came this guy who wanted to chat with him, who so very obviously came from a time of peace and found Shen Wei worth listening to, asked after things that have no place at a strategy table. If Ye Zun was a failed duty, Kunlun was hope.

And then, with Kunlun looming large in his mind, Shen Wei walked into this world of peace and boggled. He's resilient (had to be, to make it this far), and he's curious, and he wanted to understand wtf was going on. Of course he'd enrol in a university and become a researcher. (Even if he has no idea how computers work, poor thing.) Kunlun is a symbol of a better world and someone who believed Shen Wei would of course have a place in it.

(I suppose that like all things, this depends on one's personal experiences. I am not that far off from Shen Wei in certain respects, which gives me a ringside seat from which to yank at things.)