BEIJING — “Chase Me,” a Chinese television show, is famous for pushing its contestants to the limits. Participants scale tall buildings, skid down obstacle courses and hang from tightropes, often to the delight of screaming fans.

But on Wednesday, the show came under national scrutiny in China after a 35-year-old actor and model, Godfrey Gao, died suddenly while filming an episode in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo. Mr. Gao collapsed while running, apparently from a heart problem, according to a statement on Wednesday by the “Chase Me” production team.

The death of Mr. Gao, who was born in Taiwan and raised in Canada, set off a wave of anger on the Chinese internet, with millions of people criticizing the entertainment industry as focused on ratings at the expense of safety.

By Wednesday evening, the death of Mr. Gao was one of the most widely discussed topics on Weibo, a popular microblogging site, and hashtags about it had garnered hundreds of millions of views.