Marine ranching can increase the harvesting capacity of many species and help achieve planned and purposeful production of marine resources. However, marine ranching ecological security (MRES) has received limited attention, which has affected the management of marine ranching. To provide decision support for the management of MRES in China, we obtained the influence paths of MRES in China using probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The DPSIR (Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response) framework was employed to construct the evaluation index system of MRES, and PLTSs were used to describe the multiple values resulting from three threshold setting methods. We selected 17 samples of marine ranching enterprises in China to apply our method and input their data into multi-value QCA to identify the influence paths of MRES relating to those enterprises. We found that there exists an influence path (configuration) that causes a high level of MRES, namely F₁{2}*F₂{2}*~F₃*F₄{2}*F₅{1,2}. This means that for a high level of MRES, the driver, pressure and impact factors should be at their best levels, and the state factor can be at the normal level. MRES was at the high level whether the response factor was normal or positive. Our findings generate theoretical and practical implications managing MRES.