Rui Ellie Miao

USA TODAY

NEW YORK — When 24-year-old Chu He opened her Uber app Tuesday morning, she immediately decided to take the bus instead.

“It usually costs me around 14 yuan (about $2.11) to get to work," said He, who lives in Jiangbei district, Chongqing, a city in southwestern China. She has been a habitual Uber rider to work since September 2015. But the fare for the 20-minute ride suddenly had soared.

“It was doubled," He said. "The estimated price was 28 yuan.”

She’s not alone. Chinese riders in multiple cities are complaining about their no-longer cheap rides on social media, one day into the company’s merger with the country’s biggest ride-hailing app, Didi Chuxing.

“Uber raised its price today, it was twice as expensive,” said @Asiheatuo, a user of Weibo, a Chinese social media platform similar to Twitter, from Shenyang, Liaoning province. “I took the bus.”

Fear of a price rise spread among Chinese riders after they heard about the tie-in between the two competitors — one that will create an industry giant that has more than 90% of the country’s ride-hailing market to its own.

“Oh god, it’s going to be expensive from now on,” Weibo user @cx-Morning commented under SinaTech’s news post about the deal on Monday.

The reported increase in fares arrived less than 24 hours after the firms announced the acquisition — one that, according to Chinese government, is not a done deal yet.

On Tuesday, China's commerce ministry, Mofcom, one of the country’s three antitrust regulators, said that the deal cannot go ahead if approval from them is not given.

“Mofcom has not by now received a merger filing related to the deal between Didi and Uber,” Shen Danyang, a spokesman for the ministry, said at a news briefing. “All transactions must apply to the ministry in advance. Those that haven’t applied cannot carry out a merger.”

Didi Chuxing responded that neither company is qualified for such a filing because both are loss-making in China, according to Xinhua News Agency.

"We're profitable in the USA, but we're losing over $1 billion a year in China," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick admitted in February. The money was used to pay huge subsidies to drivers. Not by choice, but because its then-competitor Didi did just so: The company had set aside $4 billion since 2015 for what Cheng Wei, Didi’s CEO, called “market fostering.”

The subsidies allowed both companies to attract riders with lower fares.

For Didi Chuxing, “at first there were free rides within 8 kilometers,” said Gewen Chen, 40, who lives in Xiamen, Fujian. “Then promotions became less and less frequent. Lately, there is none.”

“Uber had a lot of discounts from now and then,” said He. “Especially during prime times when the prices went up.”

That’s why she was confused about this morning’s soared fare. “There was no notification that there was a price surge due to higher demand,” she said. “It used to always remind you.”