Dependency parsing has gained more and more interest in natural language processing in recent years due to its simplicity and general applicability for diverse languages. Previous work demonstrates that part-of-speech (POS) is an indispensable feature in dependency parsing since pure lexical features suffer from serious data sparseness problem. However, due to little morphological changes, Chinese POS tagging has proven to be much more challenging than morphology-richer languages such as English (94% vs. 97% on POS tagging accuracy). This leads to severe error propagation for Chinese dependency parsing. Our experiments show that parsing accuracy drops by about 6% when replacing manual POS tags of the input sentence with automatic ones generated by a state-of-the-art statistical POS tagger. To address this issue, this paper proposes a solution by jointly optimizing POS tagging and dependency parsing in a unique model. We propose for our joint models several dynamic programming based decoding algorithms which can incorporate rich POS tagging and syntactic features. Then we present an effective pruning strategy to reduce the search space of candidate POS tags, leading to significant improvement of parsing speed. Experimental results on two Chinese data sets, i.e. Penn Chinese Treebank 5.1 and Penn Chinese Treebank 7, demonstrate that our joint models significantly improve both the state-of-the-art tagging and parsing accuracies. Detailed analysis shows that the joint method can help resolve syntax-sensitive POS ambiguities <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\{{\ssr{NN}},{\ssr{VV}}\}$</tex> </formula>. In return, the POS tags become more reliable and helpful for parsing since the syntactic features are used in POS tagging. This is the fundamental reason for the performance improvement.