Cecilia Yip and Rebecca Li Manxuan represented two generations of talent when they appeared at this year’s Kering Women in Motion session in Shanghai and they turned their attention to how they saw the Chinese film industry had evolved. Yip first emerged in Chinese-language cinema in the early 1980s – winning the best actress prize at the Hong Kong Film Awards for Hong Kong 1941 (1984) – and recalled how she was immediately struck by the objectification of the actresses she worked with, as much as herself. But times, she said, had slowly changed. “They used to refer to us as ‘flower vases’,” said Yip. “It caused me a lot of distress but it is not a phrase you hear anymore.…