Non-US-ASCII characters in URIs are escaped by default as per RFC 2396 to avoid ambiguities across differnt locales and unicode encoding formats. Maybe you see this transformation of your chinese characters as "them being destroyed"?

use URI;
my $URI = new URI "http://example.com/オークシ
+ョンなどの";
print $URI->as_string;
__END__
___output___
http://example.com/%E3%82%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AF%E3%82%B7%E3%83%A7%E3%83
+%B3%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A9%E3%81%AE
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