中國究竟有無罪感及懺悔傳統是一個在學界久經爭議的問題，然而由近現代而起的批判論述卻也反映當時國人對於「懺悔」本身――或自白、自我譴責――在概念及話語習慣上的轉變，值得我們反思：近現代中國所理解的懺悔是否有別於傳統？若確實有所不同，其差異的關鍵又在何處？本文從現代傳媒的角度討論懺悔書寫在民初1910到1920年代的公眾化傾向，論證懺悔作家面對廣泛而陌異的大眾讀者有意識甚至策略性的自我暴露，進而建構其身為作家的身份主體。本文首先以記者黃遠生及政治家孫少侯的案例整體討論此一時期報刊雜誌上的懺悔書寫現象，其次聚焦於以自我暴露而聞名的小說家郁達夫，論證其書寫的文學史意義不僅在於作家單方面露骨的自我表述，更在於面對公眾讀者的對話意識，進而在此發語―受話的輿論情境中形塑創作者的自我主體表現。這些案例讓我們看到近現代中國人對於懺悔書寫的期待想像已隨新興的媒體出版大眾化，是他們視為模範的西方作家如聖奧古斯丁、盧梭、托爾斯泰等從未經歷的讀寫關係；而民初懺悔作家面對讀者的矛盾自曝心態及發表作品的策略性拿捏也有助於我們反思傅柯根據西方懺悔傳統所提出的制約架構。

It has been debated if the Chinese had the sense of sin and a tradition of confession. Yet the modern background of the debate is by itself interesting, as it reveals the transformation of the people’s concepts and discourses about “confession,” and urges us to reconsider whether the understanding of confession among modern Chinese differed from that of their predecessors. If so, what would be the key distinction? From the perspective of mass media, this article discusses how confessional writings in the early Republican period, particularly the 1910s and 1920s, became public acts. It argues that confessional writers, as they faced a wide and alien public audience, exposed themselves consciously and strategically, and established their authorship according to these codified experiences. Using a journalist and a politician as case studies, the article first discusses the phenomenon of confessional writings in newspapers and periodicals. Then it focuses on the novelist Yu Dafu, who is well known for his fictions of self-exposure. It argues that his works are significant in literary history, not only for creating a culture of self-exposé, but also for deploying his self-expository monologues as form of dialogue that deliberately engaged with and reshaped a new public space. This dialogical context refashioned public opinion with participated in a feedback loop with the novelist’s self-representations. These examples show that, along with the emergence of mass media, the modern Chinese began to codify confessional writings as acts of publicity. This sense of publicity constructs an author-reader relationship never experienced by Western writers such as St. Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Leo Tolstoy, even though modern Chinese worshipped them as models for confessional writing.