A modular multilevel converter based high voltage direct current (MMC-HVDC) with DC fault self-clearing is adopted to deal with the DC short-circuit fault. However, the constant power load characteristic of the sub-modules causes capacitor voltages to diverge and the converter to go out of hot standby. To address this problem, a novel DC short-circuit fault ride through strategy is proposed. According to the polarities of grid voltages, the working or blockage of the upper and lower bridge arms is chosen according to six sections to obtain a cascaded star converter. The capacitor voltages of MMC sub-modules are maintained and balanced through the control similar to the cascaded star converter. Moreover, in order not to change zero crossing, a cluster balancing control method by scaling the amplitudes of the modulated waves is proposed to balance the capacitor voltages between phase clusters. The strategy also achieves the DC Bus line-to-line equipotential and no fault current generated. With the switches of two modes (normal operation and fault ride through operation) after the fault is cleared, the power transfer of MMC-HVDC can be recovered quickly. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed fault ride through strategy is demonstrated on the 21-level MMC-HVDC simulation model in PSCAD/EMTDC.