Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet at gmail.com]

That's really strange.  The chinese characters I am inputing into the
post are not being displayed.  Basically, what I am doing is this:

h = Header('(Some Chinese characters inserted here', 'GB2312')

And when I run this code, I receive the following error message:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'gb2312' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3:
illegal multibyte sequence

Any idea what I may be doing wrong?  How do I convert Chinese
characters into something like p\xf6stal in the original code posted
by Martin?  Can someone point me in the right direction?  I'm not even
sure what class/method to look into for this.