Application of system methods in safety management of coal mine in China

This paper discusses not only the success but also the limits when hard system methods are used to deal with the safety management problems and the urgent necessity to make use of soft system method. Hard system methods, according to the past situations, are not very good at handling complicated relationship of economic interest. However, that is just the very thing that soft system methods do well in. Finally, it concludes that when referring to solve safety management of coal mine effectively, hard system methods and soft system methods should fully combine with each other even now when we emphasize the research and application of soft system methods.