Alternative title: You Know You’re in Trouble When the . . .

1. JV partners haven’t spoken to each other for 7 years.
2. CFO is the wife of the local partner.
3. Foreign investor has never visited the JV and forgot what city it’s in.
4. Local partner claims he is son of a PLA general.
5. Neither party can remember who was supposed to file the application docs.
6. Partner’s famous local brand is indeed well known, but is owned by another company.
7. Your promise to help your partner expand his stinky tofu franchise overseas is not working out so well.
8. Turns out that your $10 million factory is on the site of the future Olympic race walking venue.
9. Your partner just got thrown in jail for unauthorized sales of State-owned assets, and the buyer was the JV.
10. Your CEO, at a public meeting in Taipei, tells his good friend Chen Shuibian that he supports independence 100%.

(I used this in my FDI class recently as a way to wrap up the lecture on joint ventures. Two-thirds of the class are Chinese students, who are generally hesitant to laugh at anything the professor says, so in the face of a lot of silence, I was not able to tell if the humor went over well or not. Perhaps some things should remain a mystery.)