Is setdefaultencoding bad?

[moerchendiser2k3]

Hi, I embedded Py2.6.1 in my app and I use UTF-8 encoded strings
everywhere in the interface, so the interface between my app and
Python is UTF-8 so I can simply write:

print u"\uC042"
print u"\uC042".encode("utf_8")

and get the corresponding chinese char in the console. But currently
sys.defaultencoding is still ascii. Should I change it in the site.py
and turn it to utf-8 or is this not recommended somehow? I often read
its highly unrecommended but I can't find an explanation why.

Thanks for any hints!!
Bye, moerchendiser2k3