How are PLAAF/PLANAF planes navigated?

I guess this question doesn't just concern planes, it could be applied o PLAN vessels too, as well as various PLA artilerry battalions, or SAM brigades, etc. But not to digress, how do planes navigate? Say they need to take off from airbase A, fly 200 km out over the sea to point B (at precisely xxxx hours) where one flight is to combine with another one. Then they all have to proceed 300 km more out the sea, while flying low to avoid radar, to deliver a ground strike on small warehouse located in a village on island which is at point C. Doing all that requires certain precision. Just how does one do that? Please do explain it step by step as if i was a four year old.

I was studying aviation navigation and communications in my university, and I am supposed to know all of these. However, like most people I spent my college years busy doing something else, so don't really remember much of it.

Basically, for military aircraft there are a number of ways for navigation. The most basic one is called VOR (VHF Omni-directional Radio Range). The details can be found here:
The basic idea is to have many radio navigation sites across the country and the aircraft will receive the signal and use it to calculate its position and direction. These are also used by civil aircraft such as airliners.

For ships the equvelant is called LORAN (LOng RAnge Navigation): .

Of course the military aircraft also has and GPS onboard to assist the navigation. When the aircraft fly over other country's air space or in the sea, they have to rely on these navigation systems completely.

For larger and older aircraft such as H-6 and Y-8 they also have a dedicated navigator sitting in the 'Glass-in' nose of the aircraft, where they can observe the ground terrain features such as mountains and rivers and compare those with the map to find out their position manually. This method has been used since WWII. Of course newer aircraft does not use this method.

Thank you very much for the links and your effort. Upon reading it, I am more sure that china (as any non GPS like military) may face quite a problem in actual war conditions.

All is nice while one can rely on domestic network of radio ranging units which can be made quite mobile. But, for a scenario far outside such network, such navigation would not work. LORAN type of navigaton, as far as i can tell, not only is of less precision but its emitters are large and fixed in order to achieve frequencies needed for propagation of signals over sea surface. They may turn out to be one of the first targets in any possible conflict.

So then the planes from my question are a bit buggered. While ground radio ranging units can help them to achieve the B point rendezvous, once they get far enough and low enough, they're completely on their own. So it is only accelerometers, compass and various altimeters and speedometers to rely on. It would mean accumulation of perhaps up to few hundreds of meters of error over the 300 km to target point. And that is providing the flight is completely straight and controlled. If there is any kind of enemy attack (be it by AAMs or SAMs or what not) which would force the planes to do evasive manouvers, errors would be even greater. In the end, when planes come into range to release their weapons - there is no way to achieve any sort of precision on the target, even if weapons themselves have INS.

Well, even the US military aircraft did not have GPS capabilities until the early 1990s. INS actually could provide fairly high accuracy of navigation. Don't forget, most ballistic missiles are still using INS for guidance. Also you rarely see any air-launched ground attack weapon using INS for guidance.

Of course various inertial navigation systems alongside with good ol' compass and other stuff can give a decent precision, enough to get the plane to a broad area from which the crew can visually spot the target. But that means flying very close to target and flying at relatively low altitudes. Very dangerous. No way to launch a stand off bomb with any kind of precision. INS would be screwed up by evasive manouvers when close to enemy. INS alone in the bomb does seem good enough for stand off attacks but only providing the plane knows precisely where it is at the moment of launch. Oh well, better to just wait 10 years and use beidou 2 satellite navigation system.