You can make "top journals" quantitative with metrics like impact factor. And even though that's not a perfect system, having a difference of three orders of magnitude (.05% to 50+%) means that there really is a meaningful difference in the quality of papers.
Is there a language issue? (I assume all the top journals are international and English, but are there also Chinese language journals which are influential in China but not considered "top" globally?)
Some material might also be most relevant within China, or where the users are Chinese language primarily, so it would make more sense to publish locally -- Chinese history, current politics, maybe some specific economic articles around China, potentially things related to major Chinese engineering works like the new space program, etc.
(Still no idea if language is even a factor, but it seems plausible.)