This time last year, Gong Li was asked about the absence of Chinese films at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. True to form, the candid actress responded with blistering criticism of the Chinese film industry. The lull had been going on for some time, she told China Daily, and international audiences “don’t have high expectations for today’s films in China”.

One wonders what Gong, whose last appearance in the Cannes line-up was in 2014, with Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home, would have to say this year. Unveiled by the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, on April 14, the programme initially did not contain a single Chinese-language feature. China’s sole representative in the so-called “official selection” is Qiu Yang’s A Gentle Night, in the festival’s short-film competition.

Cue panic in the media. “Chinese Cinema Snubbed Again in Official Selection,”ran a Hollywood Reporter story. “Frémaux: Chinese Films Unsuitable For Cannes” a Sina.com headline declared, referring to how the artistic director deems China’s main­stream fare as ill-suited to his and his programmers’ tastes. “Chen Kaige: This is Not the End of the World,” ran a headline on Phoenix Television’s online news portal, quoting the filmmaker who won Cannes’ top prize in 1993, with Farewell My Concubine.

There is a bright side, however, as Chinese filmmakers have made inroads into parallel sections at Cannes. Beijing-born, United States-based filmmaker Chloé Zhao’s second film, The Rider, is to be screened at the Directors’ Fortnight, for years the more inclusive and audacious cousin to Frémaux’s official selection.

Last Laugh – rookie filmmaker Zhang Tao’s French-backed reworking of his award-winning directorial debut, Laughing to Die (2016), about an old woman living with her troubled offspring – is part of the smaller but fiercely independent-minded ACID programme.

And a call from Frémaux’s team finally came when the festival announced the addi­tion of Li Ruijun’s Walking Past the Future to the Un Certain Regard section. These late tweaks, however, couldn’t alter the impression that Chinese cinema’s presence is declining at Cannes, where filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye scooped awards aplenty with their fantastic, idiosyncratic and usually officially disapproved films in the 1990s and 2000s.

Frémaux’s comment about Chinese film that it’s “stretched out” between auteur and commercial cinema actually describes the relationship between China and Cannes these days. While Chinese films are scarce at the festival proper, which started on May 17, the country’s film industry has been bolstering its presence at the Marché du Film – the film market, which is of more significance to the throngs of executives visiting Cannes every May.

The appointment of Fan Bingbing as a member of the festival jury, for example, is destined to raise Cannes’ profile in China, and the country’s profile among the inter­national contingent at Cannes – which is as much about business as it is about art.