| The Indo-Chinese Gleaner (May 1817 to April 1822) was an English quarterly founded by Protestant missionaries Robert Morrison (1782-1834) and William Milne (1785-1822) in Malacca, with Chinese society, history and culture as its main concern among its diverse content. With respect to Chinese law, it focused on attacking the legal system, especially Chinese criminal law and criminal procedure, including the overuse and brutal implementation of the death penalty, persistent illegal use of torture, local officials' dereliction of duty and judicial corruption, widespread adultery and murder, and moral decay, etc. Chronologically speaking, such attack and denial coincided with and further facilitated the switch of the turn-of-the-century mainstream Western view toward criticism of the Chinese law. The journal's preference to construct Chinese law in such image could be mainly attributed to its founders' sense of Christian supremacy and their unsatisfactory situation in China. With its founders and main contributors' influence in both religious and secular worlds as well as the wide dissemination of its descendant, The Chinese Repository (1832-1851), the negative image of Chinese law created by The Indo-Chinese Gleaner's has had a lasting and far-reaching impact. |
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