Rolling Stone [magazine]: Bowie Drummer Happy to Be Free

Sterling Campbell was travelling in China when he got word to keep the summer months open. The long time drummer for David Bowie would be needed for several dates to promote Heathen, and then for Moby's Area2 festival, which kicks off July 28th. "It's going to be great," says Campbell, who looks forward to introducing Moby's younger fans to Bowie's live act. "It's going to be two visionaries on the road." The thirty-eight-year-old musician -- a former member of Duran Duran and Soul Asylum -- was en route to a more perilous gig when he got the call: a pro-Falun Gong demonstration in Tiananmen Square.

He was one of fifty-nine North Americans and Europeans who attempted to unfurl banners and voice support for the banned movement on February 14th, during celebrations of the lunar new year. According to Campbell, he was questioned and beaten for thirty hours by Beijing police because of his involvement. "It's a long way from being in Duran Duran," Campbell says of his grim, unplugged turn with civil disobedience.

Also known as Falun Dafa, Falun Gong is a form of qigong (pronounced chee-gong), an ancient Chinese exercise and meditation practice. [...]

On the afternoon of the fourteenth, Campbell says he passed through a security checkpoint and into Tiananmen Square. Within moments he heard the shouts and footsteps of fast-approaching police officers, who had caught a companion with a Falun Gong book.

He and several others were whisked into a van and taken to a police station. "They were always trying to hide your face," he says. "They didn't want anyone to know that you were a Westerner."

According to Campbell, at the station, officers then threw him against a wall and demanded his passport, which was in his hotel room. "You couldn't get through to these people," he recalls. "They were totally programmed."

The musician describes being punched and kicked to the floor after refusing to cooperate. He says that more demonstrators, including women, were dragged into the room and beaten. After an hour and a half the group was taken to an anonymous building with the facade and lobby of a hotel, where the abuse continued into the next day.

"I never thought I'd be doing this," Campbell says. "I have no interest in politics. None." He began practicing Falun Gong four years ago, and claims it helped him shake the trappings of rock stardom. "You can figure it out if You?ve seen Behind the Music," he says -- drugs, booze, two packs of cigarettes a day. He made the trip out of solidarity with persecuted Falun Gong followers in China.

Historically wary of religious movements, the Chinese government banned the group in July 1999 after leaders were taken off-guard by a demonstration involving an estimated 10,000 people. Thousands of Chinese practitioners have since been imprisoned. According to human rights groups, Falun Gong followers' plights includes "re-education through labour," physical and psychological abuse, and sometimes death. The Falun Dafa Information Centre (www.faluninfo.net) lists 422 practitioners that it says have died from police torture, and estimates that -- including undocumented cases -- there may have been more than 1,600 fatalities.

According to Campbell, he was never officially arrested. The police would not tell him why he was being held -- and typically responded to questions by commanding him to shut up, or hitting him. When he was put on an airplane on the following evening, his only visible wounds were bruises on his arms.

"China is a country ruled by law. Of course, foreigners visiting China have to abide by Chinese law," explains a press representative from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., who claims that, to his knowledge, foreigners have not been physically abused. "I think almost all of the governments in the world would deal [with this] in the same way."

Amnesty International has a different take. "Torture and ill-treatment are endemic within China's criminal justice system, particularly during the initial stages of detention, when suspects may be tortured in order to obtain further information or a confession," says Mark Allison, of Amnesty's East Asia Research Team, who says that Campbell's story jibes with other cases. "We are receiving almost daily reports of people being beaten or ill-treated because of the membership in Falun Gong." He emphasizes that Chinese practitioners typically receive harsher treatment than foreigners.

Throughout the ordeal, Campbell claims that he remained strangely calm and tried to engage his captors, many of whom he describe as kids. "Most of the time," he says, "they couldn't look you in the eye."

Others were less reticent -- like the officer who Campbell, an African-American, says approached him and cackled repeatedly, "You like Michael Jordan? You like Michael Jordan?"

The most surreal moment came during a break in an interrogation, when a young policeman turned on a television. He flipped to a music station and Paul McCartney's "Freedom" video came on, with Mandarin subtitles.

The irony was too thick for the locked-up rocker. "I got up and said, 'Read those lyrics!'" he says. "'Do you understand what that means?'"