Hall of Contrition
The Hall of Contrition (追愆堂) is a special hall in the National Memorial Chapel that commemorates the individuals who have died needlessly due to misgovernment. The name of the hall literally means "to contemplate past wrongs".
Commemoration
Procedure
The Civil Service Council holds a special session to discuss the merits for inclusion of a deceased person into the Hall of Contrition at the convocation of the sitting government or of the Audit Council. A simple majority suffices to direct the National Mausoleum Commission add the individual to the Hall.
When an individual is added to the Hall, their physical remains are not transported to the Hall as it is a memorial and not a cemetery. Instead, a stele is erected bearing their name and the government error that led to their demise. The wording of the inscription is agreed upon between the Civil Service Commission and the victim's survivors, if any. Some language is usually added at the end of the narrative that gives the government's attempt to redress the injustice caused, including compensation paid to the victim's family and reforms to prevent like events in the future.
It is unusual for the inscription to name the person responsible for the death of the victim commemorated, but extreme circumstances or highly localized responsibility may lead the Civil Service Council to approve of such a written rebuke. Indeed, this is the case for the very first person to be commemorated in the Hall, Chen Soi-teng, who only died because a group of executioners mistook him for another death row inmate and executed him despite his protest. In this case, the inscription names the four responsible executioners and states that they have been convicted of tax fraud.
Ceremony
As in the case for other halls in the National Memorial, the Commission prepares a food offering twice each lunar month and a daily incense offering.
Political significance
The purpose of the Hall of Contrition, from its inception, is to demonstrate formally the government's remorse for its actions that have caused unnecessary deaths. Since public reception is a clear part of the reason why the Hall exists, it follows that fatalities are not commemorated here unless the government is seen as the primary party to blame for such fatalities. Generally, accidental fatalities as a result of genuine mistakes do not result in a decision to commemorate the victim in the Hall of Contrition.
It has been noted that individuals are generally not placed here unless public anger has been aroused and commemorating the victim here would serve to pacify the public. In other words, if a fatality has occurred but has yet to rouse public outrage, it is very unlikely the government wold proactively commemorate the victim of its errors here.
Whenever the memorial stele makes mention of the individual responsible for occasioning the unnecessary fatality, there is usually a lively debate whether this amounts to an extrajudicial censure of the person responsible. In the case of Soi-teng, the commemorative stele mentions the four executioners who mistakenly executed Soi-teng as well as their home towns. Their home towns have since taken to striking them off the census rolls in response to the indignity of being named as the origin of the censured individuals. There is also a pending petition from these towns, as of 2024, to scrub the place name off, as it is perceived to be shameful for the townspeople.
Specifying a person by their home town was a typical way in 1950s China to disambiguate amongst individuals who have the same name. Without this disambiguation, persons who by chance have the same names as the censured executioners may feel unduly attacked by the inscription.
In other cases, some prominent jurists argue that whatever moral and legal compensation that the government may impose on an individual for their wrongdoing ought to be approved and done through a judicial avenue instead of a public inscription that censures the individual and that also has been shown to cause public shame. On the other hand, it is likewise contended that the purpose of the Hall is to highlight the need for government reflection and contrition for its agents' actions. This would be impossible to achieve without identification.