Rsync with Linux server: special character problem
I finally figured out that apart from updating rsync, I also had to switch the order in which I specified the character sets: I thought you were supposed to specify the character set in the order of transformation; but it seems as that is not the correct syntax. Rather, one should always use --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 when initialising the rsync from the mac, and always use --iconv=utf-8,utf-8-mac when initialising the rsync from the linux machine, no matter if I want to sync files from the mac or linux machine.

Then @Mark's solution works like magic!