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I have looked at the source code for the MS C library (it
comes with VC++6) and I believe that that something
equivalent to the following is used:

char codepage[16];
GetLocaleInfo(
    GetThreadLocale(),
    LOCALE_IDEFAULTANSICODEPAGE,
    codepage, 16);

This returns "1252" for "C" locale, and for the chinese
locale that I was expirmenting with it returns "936". 
Python does not have an encoding "cp936", but from C the
conversion with an explicit codepage produces the same
results as mbstwcs.