In the early 1990s, Chang Yuan, a Chinese social system engineering expert, put forward during a number of training courses for the secretaries of the prefectural/municipal legal committees and judicial directors across the country organized by the Central Political and Law Management Cadre Academy: "The so-called social security System engineering refers to the use of system engineering theories and methods to analyze and evaluate the social security system and its system environment, integrate multiple methods, coordinate multiple countermeasures, and establish a huge system for comprehensive management of social security issues, and Make it operate continuously and effectively to achieve social behavior control.” According to Yang Jianguang and Luo Meifen, experts in legal system engineering, social security system engineering refers to the use of system engineering theories and methods to analyze and evaluate social security issues, and integrate multiple Means, coordinate a variety of countermeasures, construct the whole society into a system that can continuously optimize the overall control of the social security situation, and make it continue to operate effectively and gradually become a process of perfection. This process is not only a practical process of comprehensive management of social security, but also a process of perfecting social security system engineering technology. The members of the social system engineering expert group generally believe that the concept of social security system engineering or public security system engineering more accurately summarizes the spiritual essence of China’s “comprehensive governance” policy, because “comprehensiveness” is only one aspect of the “system” characteristics (comprehensiveness). ), and "governance" has also been summarized in the terms "security" and "engineering". "Social security system engineering" or "public security system engineering" is enough to express all the meanings of the term "social security comprehensive management system engineering".
The expert group of social systems engineering emphasizes: Public Security System Engineering is not a discipline in itself, but a system with the goal of understanding and solving public security problems, based on a unified system engineering framework (Systems Engineering Architecture), a scientific, interdisciplinary, cross-field, open, and continuous evolutionary integrated integration of all related things and processes, including subjects (organizations and individuals), norms (legal norms and non-legal norms) , Standards, theories (police theory and other theories), methods, technologies (information technology and other technologies), equipment, facilities, procedures and practices, etc.
Because public security is only one of the security domains or branches, from a higher level, public security system engineering belongs to a super category-Security System Engineering (SSE), that is, in system thinking Under the guidance, use advanced systems engineering theories and methods to analyze and evaluate safety and its influencing factors, establish a comprehensive integrated safety prevention and control system and make it continue to operate effectively. In short, it is the totality of safety work that consciously uses the principles and methods of systems engineering under the guidance of system thinking.