It controls party personnel assignments throughout the national system, and compiles detailed and confidential reports on future potential leaders of the CCP.

The Organization Department is indispensable to the CCP's power, and the key to its hold over personnel throughout every level of government and industry.

[8]: 123  The nomenklatura system is how a Leninist ruling party staffs the state, exercising organizational hegemony over appointments and dominating the political life of the country.

[3] An equivalent of the Organization Department in the United States, according to The Times, would "oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, ExxonMobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, the bosses of the television networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and The Heritage Foundation.

"[10] While the system is from the Soviet Union, "the CPC has taken it to an extreme," Yuan Weishi of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong is quoted as saying by the Financial Times.

"[10] Bruce Gilley and Andrew J. Nathan write that in the promotion of individual candidates for high positions, a good rating from the Organization Department is essential.

Before the 16th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, a set of Temporary Regulations were amended to encourage the appointment of cadres that explicitly supported Jiang Zemin's theory of Three Represents.

The children of Li Peng, for example, came to hold powerful jobs in the power sector where he had ruled; while Zhu Rongji oversaw the finance sector, his son became the highly paid head of China International Capital Corporation, the country's largest investment bank; and Jiang Zemin replaced others when he was the CCP official in charge of technology, putting loyalists into top jobs, and his son into a key position.

At lower levels, the practice has been characterized by bribery, corruption, treachery, and "sheer desperate self-interest," according to the Financial Times, which examined internal documents produced by the Organization Department in Jilin.