Star Trek has always tried to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to World War III and the survival of major cities. The implication seems to be that aliens -- I would assume not the Vulcans; perhaps the Denobulans? -- helped Earth rebuild in the century between First Contact and the launch of the NX-01.
New York and DC make sense. We never saw those cities in the 23rd and 24th centuries. I think it's safe to assume World War III involved America, and major cities on the East Coast were destroyed. The West Coast appears to have been spared, given that San Francisco still exists and nobody in Picard says anything like, "Odd to be in Los Angeles, huh?"
Picard also visits Los Angeles in 2401 in both "The Star Gazer" and "Farewell." These remain Los Angeles's only "present day" appearances IIRC.
(We can also theorize that the reason we've never seen Chinese cities, or many Chinese characters, is that it was the other party in the conflict, leading the "ECON", or Eastern Coalition, Lily refers to in First Contact. Indeed, that's what First Contact co-writer Brannon Braga assumed as well.)
I absolutely detest this idea. It's completely incompatible with the idea of
Star Trek being a bright, optimistic vision of the future. You're not depicting a positive future if you're depicting China as no longer existing or as having been more decimated by World War III than majority-white countries.
It's also not that hard to imagine the EU, France included, remaining neutral in a China-US war.
To be clear, we do not know canonically that World War III was between the United States and China. The creators of
First Contact said they had originally thought to have China be the foreign enemy of which Picard assumes Lily is afraid, but decided to instead go with the far vaguer "Eastern Coalition" -- which could mean just about anything. And "Strange New Worlds," the pilot for SNW, implies that World War III grew at least in part out of the Second American Civil War; this opens up the door to the interpretation that the "Eastern Coalition" was an American faction of some sort.
Was this a mistake? Or an attempt to justify the Shanghai-ed version of Paris Discovery gave us?
To be clear,
Star Trek has
never been consistent in its depiction of Paris or of San Francisco. The versions of Paris seen in "We'll Always Have Paris,"
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and "Homefront"/"Paradise Lost" were all radically different from one-another.
San Francisco was spared; in the ENT episode “Demons”, it was mentioned that the surviving governments convened in San Francisco after the war.
Not exactly. The line was: "Having endured a catastrophic World War, Earth's governments came to this city for the purpose of creating a just and lasting peace among nations. Today, we have assembled here again, representatives of numerous worlds, to forge an unprecedented alliance."
That
could mean a peace conference was held in San Francisco after World War III. However, in real life, the
United Nations Conference on International Organization, the founding conference of the U.N., was held in San Francisco in 1945 for exactly that purpose. So I always assumed Samuels was referring to the founding of the U.N. after World War II when he said that line.
We don’t see LA because it’s supposed to have fallen into the ocean 6 years before the exchange due to a massive earthquake and become a coral reel. It its possible that Earth was compelled to completely rebuild LA after Voyager returned home. It is also possible that only a small part of LA fell into the ocean, but we never see LA anywhere in Trek until PIC, suggesting that the whole city managed to fall into the Pacific. And since Trek is sci-fi, anything could have made such a scenario happen
There's a bit in one of the historic preservation signs in PIC "The Star Gazer" that says only part of L.A. fell into the ocean.
It also not hard to image that Europe (and possibly Australia and New Zealand too) either supported or were annexed into the Eastern Coalition, considering how Picard had to calm Lily down and reassure her that he wasn’t one of them.
That is
wild speculation based on not a whole lot of evidence. Like, sure, many things are possible, but frankly you're holding onto an a priori assumption ("Eastern Coalition"="China") that has no canonical support.
And let’s not forget that the Dominion attacked Earth and Paris is the capital of the Federation. Explaining why Paris in PIC looks different from TUC/TNG.
"The Changing Face of Evil" only established that the Breen attacked Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, not Paris.
