Re: UTF8 Chinese String Comparison

[Rick James]

I fear that the data in the table is already corrupted -- probably double-encoded.

Please do

SELECT a, LENGTH(a), CHAR_LENGTH(a), HEX(a)
   FROM test_utf
   ORDER BY LENGTH(a) ASC
   LIMIT 5

If 'a' is "one Chinese character", you should (probably) get
LENGTH=3; CHAR_LENGTH=1; and 6 hex digits.
If you get twice those, then the data is not correctly stored, probably due to double-encoding. In this case, please start over on loading the data. (Yes, there may be other ways to 'fix' the data, but I don't know them off hand--probably involves multiple ALTERs.)