It's interesting to weight these numbers by population. They seem to be more or less the number of papers in select venues with an author of a particular nationality. As with sports, it's easy to say that the country X gets a lot of medals because they have a large talent pool.
The US has a pop. of 325M and a score of 26k so a weighted score of 0.080 publications (per thousand people). Germany scores 0.094, the UK 0.10, Australia 0.097.
These "academic" countries hover around 1 publication per ten thousand people. A lot of small countries punch slightly above their weight, mostly those with a long history of academia.
Adjusted for population (1.37B), China would score 0.0095 - an order of magnitude less. That's not necessarily an indication of lack of quality, but it does suggest that they're not at capacity yet.
Using national population is naive. There are probably a lot of interesting metrics you could dig out of this to get an idea of the resaerch efficiency of a country. For example China has more researchers than the US[1,2] (1.69M vs 1.38M), but not in proportion to its increased population size. The US has, proportionally, four times as many researchers than China, but doesn't spend four times as much on R&D (2.7% US, 2.1% China).
Israel is a good disproportionate example, spending 4% of GDP on research to get a pop-weighted publication score of 0.12. They also have a lot of researchers - second only to Scandinvaia at around 7k per million inhabitants. So their publication success is probabily attributable to having an above-average number of scientists coupled with a huge research budget.
[1] http://uis.unesco.org/en/news/rd-data-release
[2] http://data.uis.unesco.org/
EDIT: Most of this data is 2016-2017, might be some muddling of years. It's also 3AM so maths maybe squiffy.
If you use the number of researchers instead of population, the US publishes 14.2 "good" papers per thousand researchers, China publishes around 5.3. Maybe that's a better basis for quantity vs quality.
You could phrase this as "Given a researcher in a particular country, what are the odds of them publishing a top tier paper in a year?" and following on, "Do we expect that, given how much this country spends on research (per scientist)?"
Using GDP from Google (11.2t and 18.57t) and figures from [2], the US spends about $365k on R&D per scientist. China spends $140k per scientist. That fits rather well - the US spends 2.6x more and gets 2.7x more top publications per scientist.