This work aims to propose an efficient MPS/FEM coupling method for the simulation of fluid–structure interaction (FSI), where the MPS and FEM are respectively employed to account for fluid flows and structural deformation. The main idea of our method is to develop a multi-scale multi-resolution MPS method for efficient fluid simulations in the context of MPS/FEM coupling. In the developed multi-scale MPS method, the fluid domain is discretized into particles of different resolutions before calculation, where particles close to the interest domain will be discretized into high resolution, while the rest are discretized into low resolution. A large particle interacting with small particles is divided into several small particles virtually, and weight functions are redefined to maintain the simulation stability. A bucket-sort-based algorithm is developed for the fast search of multi-resolution neighboring particles. The capacity of a newly proposed ghost cell boundary model is further enhanced, so as to accurately treat wall boundary problems with particles of different resolutions. On this basis, the multi-resolution MPS method is coupled with the FEM for FSI simulations. Finally, several numerical examples are conducted to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the development method.