(If you ignore the "China is Evil" bit for a minute) It kind of makes sense: you steal money from a country, maybe go to jail for a bit, leave the country, reunited with all your stolen money. Not so good.
From the government's point of view, why should crimes of violence like murder or aggravated sexual assault warrant a harsh punishment, but economic crimes that affect vastly greater numbers of people receive more lenient treatment?
Given that we can approximate a lifetime's productive labour to, say, $1M, a fraud involving multiple millions in stolen money amounts to alienating multiple life's worth of work. Steal $500M and you've done the equivalent of wiping out five hundred lifetimes' work.
If your perspective is that the judicial system exists to punish crimes against the state, then a $500M fraud is considerably worse than the actions of a serial killer.
(That's not the judicial theory we run on here in Scotland, but it's rather closer to the way things work in one-party states.)
If you hold any other opinion, you are fooling yourself. A lot of people will go to great length to deny it, but if you think about it unprejudiced, you'll have to accept it. There are just too many instances where spending amount X of money can save a life and people make the conscious decision not to do so because X is more than they can or want to afford. Usually they'll rationalize or otherwise hide this reason (or even the fact that they even made a decision), but it's there.
And this is indeed the founding assumption at which many totalitarian regimes operate.
How does this have anything to do with totalitarian regimes?
Now this is a promising beginning. Put that Randian tone aside if you want to be taken seriously.
> There are just too many instances where spending amount X of money can save a life and people make the conscious decision not to do so because X is more than they can or want to afford.
We're not talking about saving someone's life in varying circumstances. We are talking about cut-off figure that makes e.g. financial crime punishable by death. Those societies that practice it, tend to be totalitarian, with the conversion rate to e.g. RMBs or Soviet Roubles written down in criminal law.