The rising son

He's the most senior ethnic Chinese politician in the European Union and the youngest member of Britain's House of Lords, and when he visits, he hobnobs with the great and the good of Hong Kong; but you've probably never heard of him.

Lord Wei - or Nathanael Wei Ming-yan - tends to flit in and out of this city. He's made two trips so far this year and given his parents are Hongkongers, born and bred, it's surprising how little we know about him. It's not as though there are many Chinese peers in the House of Lords.

In fact, there have been just three - and it's fitting that Wei is the third, given he has a penchant, as I shall discover, for speaking in threes. Baroness Dunn (of Hong Kong Island, and of Knightsbridge) was the first Chinese to be made a life peer, in 1990. She wielded considerable power in business and government in Hong Kong in her time. And then came the late Singaporean-born doctor Michael Chew Koon Chan, who made his mark in Liverpool as a physician and, in 2001, was made Baron Chan of Oxton (in the County of Merseyside), a "people's peer" (see sidebar), for his work with minorities and in health care. And Lord Wei? The name draws blank looks from most in his parents' home city.

He may have been born in Britain, but Wei is fiercely proud of his Chinese heritage. In town this month, the 36-year-old social entrepreneur found time to address an audience at the Asia Society, in Admiralty, and began his talk by revealing that his grandfather came from the village next to that of Sun Yat-sen, near Xiangshan (now Zhongshan, which is just to the north of Macau and Zhuhai). On the run, the "founder of modern China" took refuge in the Wei family's village and, when the imperial guard came looking for him, so the story goes, the villagers claimed he wasn't there. Sun was thus able to escape into exile in Hong Kong and into the history books.

Says Wei: "Little did I know that two generations later, after being born and growing up in the UK, that I'd have the opportunity to follow a little bit in his footsteps."

This is a man not lacking in ambition or self-confidence. The topic of his speech at the Asia Society was "Building the Chinese Dream", the very subject on which President Xi Jinping spoke in his inaugural address last month. But Wei is at pains to point out that he was ahead of the trend.

"A couple of years ago, I gave a speech - one of my first in the region - at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, about the Chinese dream and the Chinese diaspora … Little did I know that a Tsinghua alumni - Xi Jinping - would start talking about this idea of the Chinese dream, and suddenly it's really gone mainstream," he says.