Provincializing vulnerability: Rethinking communication inequality in East Asia's COVID-19 research

This article examines how East Asian COVID-19 scholarship conceptualizes vulnerable groups and communication inequality, and what this regional corpus contributes to comparative health communication and the sociology of epidemics. Drawing on bibliometric mapping and article-level thematic coding of 184 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 on China, Japan, and South Korea, the study compares East Asia-focused research with global COVID-19 literature. The findings show that East Asian scholarship tends to define vulnerability through situational system mismatch. Children, students, older adults, women, people with disabilities, chronic disease patients, and low-income groups become vulnerable when crisis governance disrupts the institutions, platforms, family relations, and support systems on which they depend. The article further identifies four mechanisms through which communication inequality intensifies vulnerability: institutional and technological exclusion, failures of understanding and judgment, interruptions of support, and governance exposure and stigma amplification. Even within East Asia, the literature shows important internal differences. Japanese studies foreground aging and norm pressure, Chinese studies emphasize urban-rural educational inequality and youth vulnerability, and Korean studies appear closer to global research in their attention to digital inequality, gendered isolation, discrimination, and health management. By bringing East Asian scholarship into comparative pandemic research, this article shows how vulnerability can be generated through everyday system configurations and crisis communication infrastructures. It argues that future pandemic preparedness requires inclusive communication systems alongside medical and epidemiological capacity.