What does "central tenant" mean?

Context:

Another instance is the huge number of volunteers who responded to the Sichuan earthquake. There is also a great increase in non-governmental organisations, few of which are officially registered and regulated. The rise of a large middle class who use the internet, travel abroad, and demand world-quality services and goods is matched by the state's ideological transformation from the central tenant of the era of radical Maoism that the Chinese individual owes his or her life to the party-state to the seemingly ordinary, but for the Chinese truly extraordinary, proposition that the state owes the individual a chance at a good life.