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Yes, it is an explicit strategic policy of the Chinese government as part of "Made in China 2025" with state support (political and monetary).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

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A more direct motivation is recent U.S. sanctions on Chinese companies, the state support in semiconductor section has been boosted significantly, since decision-makers in China is now seeing the lack of state-of-art semiconductor manufacturing capabilities a critical threat to national security. Plausibly, developing the domestic semiconductor market to reduce foreign reliance is going to be a major goal.

As we see, SMIC has already withdrawn from New York Stock Exchange entirely [1], and purchased a 7nm EUV lithography machine from ASML for $120 million [2]!

[1] https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3011737/chinas-biggest...

[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/13941/smics-14-nm-mass-produc...

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