China's Central Organization Department (from Richard McGregor's "The Party")

The [Central Organization Department] is accurately, if blandly, described as the human resources arm of the [Chinese Communist] Party, but this does not do justice to its extraordinary brief and the way it is empowered to penetrate every state body, and even some nominally private ones, throughout the country. The best way to get a sense of the dimensions of the department's job is to conjure up an imaginary parallel body in Washington. A similar department in the US would oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, [ExxonMobil], Wal-Mart and about 50 of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. Not only that, the vetting process would take place behind closed doors, and the appointments announced without any accompanying explanation why they had been made.

Richard McGregor

The Party - The Secret World of China's Communist Leaders (2010, p.72)