North America is well covered in the original Star's Reach. Three civil wars in Meriga, the desertification of the center of what was the USA, and so forth.
Australia, including Tasmania, has utterly collapsed both socially and environmentally. There are 100,000 to 200,000 mainly hunter gatherers on the main continent. Very limited subsistence agriculture in the formerly Snowy and Blue Mountains. 10,000 to 20,000 in Tasmania.
China, within it's current cultivated boundaries, is largely uninhabitable due to environmental toxins. Any long term population there develops such severe health problems and birth defects that they cannot sustain a viable population. Taiwan and the mountains of the Southwest are not so badly polluted. Tibet, with a mainly Han Chinese ethnic population, is broken into many small fiefdoms.
New China is the Chinese migration north into Siberia - bordering the Rus more than a thousand km east of the Ural Mountains. With few ruins to salvage, it is metal poor and communication is a major obstacle. A few mines provide speciality metals for trading, but there is no steel industry. Kingdoms line the various major river valleys, sometimes uniting the length of the river, and more often, fragmenting.
None-the-less, New China leads the world in plant breeding for the new environment in former boreal forests.
Taiwan is independent and resorts to piracy and raids with minimal industry.
Japan expanded in the last days of the Old World, and then fragmented. Today, Japanese is spoken around the Northern Pacific Rim, but they are not unified. This has limited an industrial revival.
South America has fragmented into a variety of new nations with a mixture of governments. Some military dictatorships, some kingdoms, some democracies for the elite and even one real democracy - Central Chile. The nations of South America now co-exist in relative peace - with some bandit areas - and this has allowed some modest industrial progress. A few steam locomotive rail lines still operate for example.
Africa is contentious, with ever changing power blocs, alliances and wars. Periodically a major power emerges, but rarely continues more than a generation or two. None-the-less, some technology has been recovered.
New Zealand - The North Island has several strong sheriffs that owe nominal fealty to their King. The South Island is split into two Republics and a Kingdom. The Union has helped all four keep their small hydroelectric plants going, a couple of rail lines and supplied semi-finished goods for domestic manufacturing.
more later
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