Abstract: The foot parts of traditional reinforced concrete shear walls are prone to crush and form plastic hinges subjected to large earthquakes. In order to overcome this problem and reduce the residual drift of the structure, a bottom hinged self-centering reinforced concrete shear wall is proposed. To achieve large elastic lateral drift of the shear wall, the severely damaged bottom of the traditional shear wall is replaced, the upper wall panel is attached to the foundation through a V-shaped connecting beam in a hinge, and self-centering braces with bilinear hysteresis characteristics are installed at both sides of the wall; thus the internal force transmitted by the wall is distributed, the bending moment is resisted by self-centering braces alone, and an elastic rotation constraint forms at the bottom of the wall, thereby the residual drift of the wall is reduced. Numerical simulations are carried out to analyze the bearing capacity, energy dissipation, deformation capacity and damage distribution of traditional reinforced concrete shear wall (SW) and self-centering reinforced concrete shear wall (SC-SW) with the same section under low cyclic reversed loading. Results indicate that the SC-SW achieves the same initial stiffness and bearing capacity as SW through reasonable design, and the ductility increases by 26.52%; the damage state of SC-SW is significantly smaller than that of SW, because the energy dissipation of SC-SW is not through the plastic damage of the wall; the residual drift of SC-SW is obviously reduced, showing good self-centering effect.