Question: I have 1000 rows, many of which contain chinese or special characters. I tried uploading my excel file to Google sheets and downloading as a CSV file. However instead of displaying a ? (as it does when I try save as CSV through excel) character it just displays other random characters.

What do I need to do?

Answer: 
Try to use UTF-8 encoding and add a BOM prefix (\uFEFF) to the beginning of the file. It works for me.
You need to save the file using UTF-16 encoding, so you will need to select `Unicode Text`, however this will save the file using TAB delimiters instead of COMMAs. If this is Ok, then you are done.

Otherwise, follow this article to help you change the TABs to COMMAs.

<https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2014/04/24/convert-excel-csv/#export-csv-utf8>