Abstract: The free trade zone is a good way to adapt to the deep globalization and build a high-quality opening up system. This paper first builds a high-quality economic development system based on the panel data of 30 provinces (excluding Tibet, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) from 2010 to 2019. Secondly, the central and western free trade zones are taken as samples and the DID model is used to conduct an empirical test. The empirical results show that the high quality development level of China’s regional economy presents obvious regional characteristics, from east to west from high to low. The establishment of free trade zones has a significant positive impact on the high-quality development of regional economy, and it still holds through a series of robustness tests. The influence of the establishment of the free trade zones on the high-quality development of regional economy is mainly achieved by promoting trade liberalization, attracting more foreign investment and improving technological innovation. The policy implications are as follows: expanding the trade liberalization to improve the level of facilitation; Deepen system innovation to promote enterprise technology innovation; The government should encourage local free trade zones to develop industries in light of their own characteristics.