Abstract: At present, Central China has been promoting the experiment of establishing free trade zones and constantly expanding the influence radius of China Railway Express. The products in Central China can arrive in European market and Western Asia more conveniently and safely. Compared with the Eastern and Western regions, Central China has two main disadvantages in the process of expanding the scale of foreign trade: geographical location and policy environment. However, through participating in Belt and Road initiative, these two disadvantages are disappearing. On the whole, the scale of foreign trade in Central China is expanding fast, showing a trend of "from south to north". Foreign trade can effectively optimize industrial structure, stimulate technological progress and improve policy environment, so that participating in international trade and integrating into international market provide opportunities for Central China to promote industrial transformation and strengthen new momentum to drive development. However, both theoretical and empirical studies have confirmed that foreign trade is a "double-edged sword" for regional development. While foreign trade promotes enterprise profits and stimulates economic growth, it also contains the risks of "anti-dumping", "entity industry hollowing out" and rupture of industry chain. Whether foreign trade in Central China can steadily promote regional intensive growth needs to be clarified. Total factor productivity (TFPR) represents the efficiency of social production and the operating benefit of enterprises, which can precisely reflect intensive growth in a region. Therefore, qualitative analysis has been made on the impact of foreign trade on total factor productivity of prefecture-level cities in Central China and its possible impact mechanism. At the same time, econometric models have been constructed to empirically test the impact of foreign trade on total factor productivity based on the data of prefecture-level cities in Central China from 2006 to 2017. The results show that: Firstly, foreign trade in Central China has a direct and positive impact on regional TFP, and will have positive and indirect impact by improving the absolute level of industrial specialization and increasing the level of government expenditure; Secondly, the industries in Central China are too dependent on policies that foreign trade cannot stimulate the technological innovation obviously, and technological innovation cannot transfer into economic benefits smoothly as well; Thirdly, if a city is relatively lower in openness and scale but with better policy environment, it will receive higher improvement in TFP by expanding foreign trade; Lastly, foreign trade has heterogeneous impact on cities with different relatively specialized industries. Based on the above research results, we suggest: First, further expand the scale of foreign trade of cities in Central China, especially expand the scale of international trade in small and medium-sized cities. Second, expand diversified international product markets and increase the stability of international trade markets. When expanding international markets, more attention should be paid to cultural distance and institutional distance. Third, promote specialized industrial agglomeration and industrial transformation in Central China to improve the international competitiveness of products. Central China, in particular, should pay attention to improving the efficiency of transforming innovation into benefits.