Abstract: The Rural Revitalization Strategy and the Project of Cultural Enrichment for Xinjiang provide top-level policy support for the development of multi-ethnic forest areas in Xinjiang, and cultural identity serves as a core starting point to activate the endogenous driving force of forest areas. Taking multi-ethnic forest areas in Xinjiang as the research object, this study adopts the integrated PEST-SWOT composite model to analyze the macro external environment of cultural identity empowering rural revitalization in forest areas from political, economic, social and technological dimensions. A coupling matrix is constructed by combining internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats of the region, so as to systematically interpret the internal mechanism between the two. This paper mainly answers three core research questions: the macro environment of cultural identity empowering forest area revitalization, the coupling mechanism of internal and external factors, and the practical implementation paths adapted to the development characteristics of forest areas. The study reveals that Xinjiang's forest areas possess unique developmental strengths such as multi-ethnic coexistent mountain-forest culture and full-coverage ecological forest rangers, while confronting internal constraints including broken inheritance of folk customs, unbalanced capital allocation and the erosion of local cultural identity by exotic culture. Policy dividends, popularization of digital technology and resource input from paired assistance to Xinjiang bring promising opportunities, yet external challenges including homogenized cultural tourism products, squeezed local benefits by external capital and diminished recognition of indigenous culture caused by online ideological trends remain prominent. From the model analysis results, this study establishes four implementation paths, namely value guidance, industrial driving, collaborative governance and digital empowerment, offering theoretical support and practical countermeasures for advancing comprehensive rural revitalization in Xinjiang's forest areas relying on cultural identity.