First, check that your page is also using charset=utf-8 so the browser can auto detect the character set.
the html code to add to the header is

The main difference is how they are stored in bytes.
Read this for some direction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding

What browser do you use? Try going to view -> Character Encoding in firefox and select one of the chinese encoding methods and see whether the text got display or not.

Well, he said phpmyadmin displays it properly so i assume the data is stored correctly and its just being intepreted wrongly