The attached image shows that some CJK characters are displayed
incorrectly.  For the used outline font Emacs reports

  xft:-PfEd-AR PL UKai TW MBE-normal-normal-normal-*-18-*-*-*-*-0-iso10646-1

One character (the highlighted one) is missing in this font, and Emacs
uses a different font as a fallback:

  x:-misc-droid sans fallback-medium-r-normal--18-130-100-100-p-179-gb18030.2000-0

Note that the different font backend seems to produce the ugly
rendering; the font in question is the outline font
`DroidSansFallbackFull.ttf'.

The problem now is that the encoding of the fallback font is not
respected.  In the image, the highlighted character is U+83EF, but
Emacs incorrectly displays U+51BF instead.

The GB 18030 bytes to represent U+51BF are \x83\xEF; this clearly
shows that Emacs lacks an iconv call (or an equivalent to that);
instead, it seems to simply feed the Unicode value to the font
backend.

                        *   *   *

It's a completely different question why on my system Emacs uses a
font encoded in GB 18030 as a fallback font.  It's probably related to
the fact that I use `mew' as my e-mail program, manually extended to
cover GB 18030.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able yet to trigger the issue
with `emacs -Q' (which by default uses iso10646 for the fallback
font).  On the other hand, as soon as the problem happens, it happens
with any buffer containing CJK characters not displayable with the
current font, so it seems a genuine Emacs core bug.



In GNU Emacs 27.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.20.10)
 of 2018-02-12 built on linux
Repository revision: 3a718ffca097b35218c3e041a94adff937f3052f
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11803000
System Description: openSUSE Leap 42.3

Recent messages:
Wrote /home/wl/Mail/draft/2
Draft is prepared
Sole completion
next-line: End of buffer [3 times]
Kill draft message? (y or n) y
Saving file /home/wl/Mail/draft/2...
Wrote /home/wl/Mail/draft/2
Draft was killed
Quit
Type C-x 1 to remove help window.  

Configured features:
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GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE M17N_FLT LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS
GTK3 X11 THREADS LIBSYSTEMD JSON LCMS2

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Major mode: Summary

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Load-path shadows:
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Memory information:
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