Have you tried using <bean:write name="chinatext" property="text" filter="false"/>?
filter="false" means the tag will not "escape" HTML characteres... the default value is true IIRC. Maybe during that filtering it is also escaping non-ASCII characters? (wild guess here, since the last Struts version I used was 1.1) The problem with filter="false" is that is opens your app to all sorts of cross-site scripting security holes... so you would have to guarantee the user cannot enter some javascript code that will end up being printed by this tag later on... =(
