The Belt and Road Initiative is of great significance for leading the process of economic globalization, deepening reform, and achieving overall transition. In this context, the western region and its urban governments have formulated related local policies, which have to varying degrees promoted transformation of local economy to be more open. Taking 51 prefecture-level cities (including autonomous prefecture and regions) of the five provinces in northwest China, as the research object, this article made quantification of the local policies, responding to the Belt and Road Initiative, from the three aspects, thus impact level, policy intensity, policy objectives and measures, made visual expression to analyze the overall characteristics of the policy responses to the Belt and Road Initiative that made by various prefecture-level cities, and made use of the classification of urban function method and other methods to classify the industrial policies. The results show that: (1) From 2013 to 2017, the mean value of cumulative score of the policy response made by urban governments, has increased from 0.0078 to 30.9951 and the response rate increased from 3.92% to100%. However, the gap in cumulative scores of policy responses among prefecture-level cities is more distinct. By 2017, the arrangement has formed that Shaanxi and Gansu provinces are the core response areas, Ningxia and Xinjiang provinces are the secondary response areas, and Qinghai province is the edge response area. The policy response primarily concentrates on industries like water conservancy, environment, public facilities management, culture, sports, entertainment, transportation, warehousing, postal, tourism and manufacturing. Moreover, the types of industries that respond to the policies have increased yearly, and the policy center of industries is in a multi-polar tendency. (2) In 2017, the number of the prefecture-level cities with comprehensive, transitional as well as single industrial policies is thirty-eight, six and seven respectively. The high-profile industrial policies mainly center on the secondary and the tertiary industries: The secondary industry is dominated by manufacturing and centered in Shanxi and Gansu provinces, but Shanxi Province is more focused on medium and high-end industries. The tertiary industry is distributed in all provinces (districts), but it has significant spatial heterogeneity. For example, Shanxi Province attaches greater importance to the scientific research and technical services, financial industry and so on, but Gansu Province to the tourism. Combined the comprehensive/single discrimination with the prominent industrial policy discrimination, the types of industrial policies could be divided into six categories in detail, and the comprehensive prefecture-level cities with outstanding industrial policies are the largest in number, which is twenty-five, accounting for 49.02%. However, the number of transitional prefecture-level cities with outstanding industrial policies, single prefecture-level cities with outstanding industrial policies and transitional prefecture-level cities without outstanding industrial policies is the least. The number is equally three, each accounting for 5.88%.
